SOME THINGS YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT THOMAS
THOMAS’S BIRTH DAY
This is the family legend. It was once just the truth but it’s been told to Thomas so often it’s become bigger than that.
Thomas was supposed to have the same birthday as Jesus, but Thomas was slow arriving. It was already too hot to breathe out there in the world and maybe Thomas knew it was only going to get worse so he stayed put. But Thomas’s mother was fat and tired, tired of Thomas being in her and tired of sun and tired of dust and tired of being sweaty and tired of having a husband that kept his inner life from everyone as if they had no right to look in.
They were at Thomas’s other grandma’s. It was the Xmas pudding that did it because there wasn’t enough room in Thomas’s mother for Thomas and a full Xmas dinner and the pudding too. But it still took hours and hours for Thomas to work this out. They buckboarded his mother into the District Hospital and the District Doctor was full of Xmas cheer but he was always full of some kind of cheer and no-one was surprised. Thomas arrived at 3am anyway and the Matron and the Nurse sorted it out between them and Thomas’s father wrote in his diary for that day –
“Took a cow down to Oswald’s farm. Went up the line & got a drill I bought from Steve White. Took Ella up to the hospital & we had a son born to us. Every thing is OK.”
Everyone really wanted a girl. No that’s not true. Thomas’s mother really wanted a girl and had the name Valda ready and godonlyknows Thomas was always grateful he side-stepped that one (except for a moment where she though of calling him Digby but thank the Lord for Thomas Rafferty who was a handsome devil and her favourite cousin).
Thomas’s mother wanted a girl because she thought it would make Thomas’s father come out from his hiding place and be a normal husband who talked about things and didn’t need to write down every penny and didn’t whistle incessantly through his teeth. So it wasn’t a brilliant start for Thomas but then Jesus didn’t really do much better. But a least Jesus didn’t have a record-breaking heatwave waiting for him.
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THOMAS’S STARTING OUT
The family joke will be (we’re talking years and years into the future here) that Thomas didn’t learn to walk until he was fourteen. Just in time for High School. He didn’t learn to walk because he was fat and roly-poly, fat and roly-poly from being fed too much and from being humped around on doting female hips so he never fell over the notion of standing erect and moving under one’s own steam.
Thomas was actually fourteen months when he learned to walk. They nearly lost him when he was just weeks old, in the monster heat wave of that summer, kept alive by wet towels draped around the kitchen table. So the story goes.
Consequently the women fretted – there were Thomas’s mother, and her mother, and probably one of Thomas’s aunts or two or three – so that’s why Thomas’s feet never got to reach the kitchen lino. Only his fat backside. Because they were a fretful lot of women. And rightly so, having already buried the one before in the limestone-y gibber-y grit of the town cemetery, in a plot unmarked, unmarked to the point where Thomas’s mother put flowers on the last resting place of another woman’s child for too long, far too long for Thomas’s father’s seemingly uncaring mistake to ever be forgotten. Or forgiven.
So, that’s Thomas. Just starting out. Roly-poly. Lumpy thighs. Happy.
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THOMAS’S MOTHER
The maternal instincts of a lioness, to the point where there will be times she will drive her offspring crazy with her motherliness. It’s her will. She has strong ideas that have trouble bending and flexing, not always totally logical, not always aligned to the inner desires of her children. But her tough heart is more or less in the right place. Steering her kids into preconceived notions of what is best for them. Or trying to.
Thomas’s mother is a farm girl, born in the middle of a large family just before the war to end all wars, into the most labouring of the labouring classes. Built a bit like a work horse, strong boned, long boned, determined, she’ll never master dancing, cards, or riding a bicycle. But geez she can dump a full bag of barley and sew it with the best of them, with perfect ears and properly full, a rail siding humper’s delight.
Unlike Thomas’s father, Thomas’s mother is always (well, nearly always) going to be there. Sometimes this’ll drive her ungrateful children just a bit crazy too. Along with her sons-in-law and daughters-in-law and grandkids. But most of them will never be far from her orbit. Like gravity. Pulling away but hanging on.
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THOMAS’S FATHER
Thomas is three. He lives in a town eternally surrounded by grain and grain stubble and paddocks waiting for grain. And sheep. That’s all there is. And a few leftover patches of native scrub.
Today there’s probably a hard blue sky, because their town is out where they invented hard blue skies. And it’s probably hot, but maybe there’s a few clouds, lumpy clouds that threaten to rain but never do, simply pass through making idle promises, promises that dry-grown farmers and the sons of dry-grown farmers instinctively know to ignore. Ignore or go cranky and crazy from the futility of willing down of a bit of timely relief that isn’t coming.
Thomas doesn’t know it but his father has already gone cranky and crazy, over a patch of sandy dirt under a hard blue sky, a patch that’s let him down in the worst possible way. It gave him one good season – well, a good enough season – gave him a first crop of wheat and barley just fat enough to make him believe all that torn-up mallee scrub was worth it, all that ripping out by the roots, all that raking and piling and firing and harrowing and harassing and sowing and fretting and reaping and bagging and stitching and humping and carting to the siding. Yep, good enough. Lots of promise.
Next year drought, next year grasshoppers and mice, next year broke.
Broke but not broken.
Nursing a sense of failure.
But God was trying to tell Thomas’s father something. No, not God – Thomas’s father’s logical and mechanical and introverted mind was not built to wander so laterally as to contemplate a pre-packaged “God”. Thomas’s father surely had his own idea of God. As we all should.
His own God was trying to tell him something. And it seemed as though Thomas’s father was listening, because he pulled up his wife and his first born son and packed their Coolgardie safe and their few sticks of furniture and walked off that spinifexed and scrubbed and sandhilled block and set up in the town and bought a truck on time payment and went contracting for the Council. It was hard times.
God may have been speaking but Thomas’s father in fact wasn’t listening. Yes he was cranky and just a bit crazy, but he would hug that sense of failure to himself for thirty-five years and then he’d simply go back and try again. To balance up the books. To get even. Turn mallee and loose sandy soil and scant rainfall into the real deal. Turn it into bulk silo wheat. Showed his God what he was made of. As we all should.
But, back to where Thomas is three.
Thomas can see his father - no, he can’t see his father, he can only sense his presence nearby.
There’s nuts and bolts. They’re spread out on the tray of the truck. It’s probably his father’s truck but they’re definitely his father’s nuts and bolts.
Thomas is standing on something, his belly against the iron ledge of the truck’s tray. He’s playing with the nuts and bolts. The nuts and bolts are an assortment, and they aren’t new, not shiny but rust brown from their first lives in distant machinery. Maybe they’ve been set out in some kind of order, maybe they’ve been sorted by length and diameter, by BSW and NF and NC thread types, categories that are the meat and drink of Thomas’s father’s meticulous mind, and therefore not to be messed with.
But maybe they’re simply there, Thomas’s father’s Everything Else tin tipped out for the picking through. But only for the picking through by Thomas’s father. And maybe Thomas is picking up random nuts and bolts and throwing them over his shoulder, introducing a tiny piece of chaos to the mechanical equation. Chaos and frustration.
Thomas’s father has no capacity to absorb frustration (a trait he will damnably pass on to Thomas). Frustration is about the only thing that ever makes him appear to be passionate. In time it will be told that one day before Thomas was born, the truck died inexplicably between two sandhills at a difficult time, and Thomas’s father irrationally assaulted the truck on the front tyre, with some violence, with the crank handle. Thomas’s mother was awestruck. So, frustration. Nasty stuff.
Thomas’s father spots Thomas amongst his rust coloured nuts and bolts and happily rearranging the right order of things, and he’s angry and sharp worded, snaps out something and unceremoniously puts Thomas down on the ground and it’s all over. No big deal. But that’s the first memory Thomas is given, and keeps, of his father.
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THOMAS’S BROTHER
Thomas only has one brother at the moment but he’s more or less invisible. He’s four years older than Thomas but it will always be like ten because Thomas’s brother lives in a different orbit to the rest of his family. It’s just the way Thomas’s brother is built. He spends a lot of time with ‘his’ grandmother and ‘his’ grandfather out on the farm because he’s the first grandchild and first grandchildren are always a bit special to a grandfather with a determined dry-farmer’s small dreams of dynasty and greatness.
And that’s about all Thomas is aware of concerning his brother, or anyone else for that matter, before the city and the war and Thomas’s house.
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THOMAS’S HOUSE AND THOMAS’S PEOPLE
It’s a house in the city. It’s nothing like his house in the hot dirt country under that hard blue sky but Thomas doesn’t know that because he doesn’t remember the first house he ever lived in. He thinks this is his first house.
It’s not really in the city as you have to walk up to the top of the street and catch the tram to get into the real city.
The street is bitumen and it’s wide and the footpaths are bitumen and they’re wide too and the gutters are deep and made of stone. There’s wooden electricity poles and wires and houses of every kind in all directions. The street goes downhill and seems so long it’s like it disappears into another country. Thomas’s house is near the top.
Over the road is an Irishman who calls Thomas’s brother Micky. Next door to the Irishman is a big house in lots of grounds with a little old lady and a strange boy she has to look after even though he stabbed her in the hand one day with a school compass.
Next door to Thomas’s house on the up side is a busybody lady who looks after a friend of Thomas’s brother. Next door on the down side is a big house with a tennis court and a very pretty girl the same age as Thomas who’s name is Patty Donovan. Patty has a mother and a father but they’re so normal they aren’t part of Thomas’s world.
Thomas’s house is strong and made of stone and has a verandah that goes across the front and down one side and it’s wide and has tiles that are cool to lay down on in summer. There’s lots of rooms in the house and a piano that can play itself as long as you pump the pedals. There’s a big back verandah and it’s built in so it’s cool when it’s hot and dry when it’s wet. It’s a good place to play. Except when Thomas’s brother painfully criticises Thomas’s choice of a favourite coloured pencil. It’s strange what Thomas keeps in his head.
There’s a lawn and a garden out the front and a fancy wire fence and a gravel driveway and a gas meter. Out the back is a huge space big enough to play football in, with a rainwater tank up on a concrete cave that is full of wood. There’s an enormous almond tree at the side that has a rope swing, and a long clothesline with a pole in the middle that falls over if you don’t do it right. There’s a big shed right down the back and chooks and a woodheap and a vegetable garden, and beside the shed is an old white car that doesn’t go and it has to be checked for spiders before you can get in and make out you’re driving it to Melbourne.
Between Thomas’s back yard and Patty Donovan’s tennis court is a high tin fence with an even higher wire netting fence on top to stop the tennis balls going over but they still do anyway. But the tin part has a square hole cut in it the size of Patty Donovan’s face. Between Thomas’s backyard and the busybody’s back yard is a thin wood fence that keeps losing its wood because the wood makes great swords and arrows.
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Today Patty Donovan is on the swing under the almond tree. She’s just sitting and singing a song quietly to herself because she doesn’t know how to swing herself up yet so she’s just waiting and singing. Thomas is playing with Edwin from down the street.
Edwin is saying how he knows lots more than Thomas knows because he’s at school already but Thomas hasn’t started yet even though they’re both five. Edwin always talks loud about what he knows. Edwin is fat. Edwin is so fat that Thomas’s uncle said he’s a right little bag of wind. Thomas isn’t fat any more like when he was little and had his roly poly photo taken. Thomas’s uncle said no kid stays fat long if they’re allowed to get up off their bum and walk around a bit. But Edwin is fat. And he knows everything.
Girls don’t have doodles like boys have he tells Thomas. Thomas doesn’t say anything but by not saying anything Edwin thinks he’s saying he’s making it up so Edwin jumps up and goes over and pushes Patty off the swing and lifts up her dress and pulls down her pants and Patty is howling because she’s frightened. See. I toldya he says, and Thomas looks and sees he’s right but then he sees that Patty is really frightened but Thomas doesn’t know what to do. Patty pulls up her pants and runs for home still crying and Thomas’s aunt comes out and wants to know what all the crying’s about and Edwin says Patty fell off the swing and soon it all goes quiet and Edwin starts telling Thomas that almonds will kill you if you eat more than five at a time.
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A lot of people seem to live in Thomas’s house because now it’s the War Time. Some live there all the time and some just come and go but most of the time it’s hard to tell which is which. There’s Thomas’s mother and older brother. Then there’s another brother who was also supposed to be a girl but wasn’t. They seem to be there all the time except when his older brother goes to school or goes out with his friends and collects stuff for the war and gets great things like battleships and aeroplanes to hang on his chest for doing it but he hates taking Thomas with him because that’s just how it is.
Then there’s the people who come and go.
There’s Thomas’s favourite uncle, and the aunt who makes him eat everything on his plate. They either live in the house with them or down the street but they’re always coming and going. Thomas’s uncle laughs like a machine gun and has his hair parted in the middle and he rides a bike to work with a kitbag between the handlebars. Thomas’s aunt plays the piano and can’t eat fish and hates yellow flowers.
There’s Thomas’s grandmother who walks heavy and comes for visits but doesn’t go again for weeks sometimes months. There’s also some other aunts who aren’t always proper aunts they’re just called aunts. And then there’s the soldiers.
There’s Brownie who’s a bit short and a bit brown but not all that brown more like a big tan. He was an orphan when he was a kid but now he belongs to the army. Then there’s Lofty who’s tall like a straight tree and he has rusty coloured hair and a scar the size of a bob bit on the back of his neck that was made by a Jap bullet when Lofty was lying face down in the mud but not quite face down far enough and he winks at his mate Brownie when he tells that.
Lofty sometimes gets a fit of the malaria and the women lay him on the sofa and he talks and sweats and wriggles about. It’s hard to know what he’s talking about but it sounds frightening and the women push Thomas outside.
A lot of the other soldiers come and go but Thomas can never remember them because they don’t come any more than once. But he remembers Ray who’s face doesn’t work quite right on one side because a Jap soldier put a bayonet through it while he was making out he was dead.
The soldiers wear big boots and they all like to sing around the piano. One of the aunts puts a roll of paper into the piano and pumps the foot pedals and the piano plays itself and the keys move on their own and they all stand around and smoke and sing and drink beer and tea and the next morning they’re gone when Thomas wakes up, and then it’s either a long time till they come back or they don’t come back at all.
Then there’s Thomas’s dad. Thomas knows it’s his dad because his mother tells him that’s who it is. He’s in an army uniform and he’s sitting in the lounge chair and Thomas’s mother pushes Thomas across the space between them and tells him to say hullo to your father. Thomas doesn’t know what to do but neither does his father so they shake hands.
The War Time is a strange Time but so far it’s the only Time that Thomas knows.
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Thomas’s older brother and some other big kids are sitting on the edge of the gutter and talking. Thomas is sitting there too but he’s right on the end and he doesn’t get to say anything. They’re talking about spitfires and minefields and soldiers getting killed in the jungle by Japs sneaking up in the dark and cutting their throats. Then they talk about comics and radios and electricity. Thomas tries to say some about comics but no-one listens.
They all stand up so Thomas stands up and Thomas’s brother and the other big kids look at Thomas. Thomas’s brother puts his hand on the big wooden electricity pole and pats it a bit. He looks at Thomas. They buried a dead kid down the bottom of the hole when they put this pole up he says and he’s not smiling but his friends are. His brother nods his head and then says Dinkum. Right down the bottom. I saw them do it. Thomas looks at the pole where it goes into the footpath and then looks at his brother but now they’re all laughing and they go off up the street and Thomas goes inside.
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THOMAS’S FIRST YEAR IN THE SEAT OF LEARNING
Thomas starts school and he’s told he has to wait for his brother to get out so they can walk home together. This day it’s raining so Thomas waits and waits but his brother doesn’t come and Thomas thinks his brother has gone home without him so he makes a run for it. Straight across the big yard. Rain coming down. Right in front of Mrs Bolster the headmistress.
Mrs Bolster bellows at Thomas and her voice comes after him and grabs him by the collar and drags him back. Mrs Bolster is angry. Angry because Thomas made a run for it and got wet and sending wet kids home to their mothers is against the rules. She stands Thomas on up on the porch bench and in a voice loud enough to make his knees shake she reminds him about the rain rule and doesn’t listen to the I’m waiting for my brother but he’s already gone home part and next thing she’s belting him across the backs of his wet legs with a large ruler and it stings like mad and Thomas is howling and doing a dance and his brother comes and Mrs Bolster tells his brother about the rule and his brother is nodding his head and trying to say that Thomas already knows about not getting wet but Thomas is still howling and doing a dance but he’s slowing down.
Mrs Bolster goes off to bellow at other kids and Thomas’s brother tells Thomas off and Thomas is already sick of school and it’s only the first week and he tells his mother he isn’t going any more but he has to go anyway.
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Sitting in a circle.
Miss Petal is reading the Wednesday Story.
Thomas has a bellyache and he hopes it’s not too long till going home time but it’s too late. The kids each side of him are sniffing and screwing up their noses and moving away and Thomas knows why and he starts to cry. Miss Petal is looking at him and now she knows why too and she says I think we might give Thomas an early minute for being so good today and she leads him to the door and tells him to go off home straight away.
Thomas is crying and Thomas stinks to high heaven and Thomas’s pants are stuck to him and Thomas’s legs don’t want to walk right. He cries all the way home and his mother wipes everything off and puts him in the bath. Again Thomas says he’s not going back to school but he only gets the next day off. But Thomas knows he’ll always be The Boy Who Kacked His Dacks In The Middle Of Wednesday Story Class.
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It’s near the end of the year. Miss Petal goes over Thomas’s book and he has everything right again and Miss Petal smiles and says he’s so clever he’ll have to go straight up to Grade Three.
The next morning Thomas lines up at Assembly with the Grade Three kids and they all say whatta YOU doin’ ‘ere yr a Grade One kid and Thomas says Miss Petal told him he’s so clever he has to go straight into Grade Three and they all laugh like mad and push him away and tell him don’t be so stupid and Miss Petal comes and rescues him and says she’s sorry and she didn’t actually mean right NOW and Thomas always thought Miss Petal would never tell him anything that wasn’t true but now he’s not sure any more.
On the way home that afternoon Thomas makes the mistake of telling his brother what happened and his brother laughs too and looks at Thomas like he’s an idiot and can’t wait to tell their mother and anyone else who’ll listen.
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THOMAS’S TIME OF WAR
For a while Thomas’s father isn’t a soldier any more but lives in the house and goes to work at the government munitions because in the War Time everyone is owned by the government and you have to go where they say.
But after a long time Thomas’s father becomes a soldier again and he disappears and Thomas’s aunt who hates yellow flowers and the uncle who laughs like a machine gun come to live with Thomas and his mother and his little brother and his big brother. And Thomas’s uncle sort of becomes their dad and kicks the footy with them in the back yard.
The footy is filled tight with newspaper because there’s no rubber for bladders because all footy bladders have to be sacrificed for the greater bloody good so Thomas’s uncle says. But the footy’s been outside over night and the paper in it is wet and now the footy weighs a ton and Thomas’s uncle boots it to Thomas but Thomas is lousy at catching anything other than the measles and it goes straight through his hands and hits him full in the face and the world goes black and his nose bleeds for ages and everyone fusses. Thomas’s uncle says he’s become another casualty of war and he goes off like a machine gun but Thomas’s auntie just goes off.
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Thomas gets a meccano set from Father Xmas because Thomas’s mother says he’s probably going to be a mechanic like his father when he grows up even though Thomas really wants to be a tram driver. Thomas thought he saw his uncle painting hundreds of bits of meccano hanging on a string across the shed before he got chucked out the door but his uncle says later he was only giving Father Xmas a bit of a hand because it’s War Time.
Then Thomas’s mother disappears. She’s gone for ages and Thomas’s aunt is his mother for a while but she’s back to making sure he eats everything on his plate.
It’s still a strange Time and somewhere near the end of it his mother comes back and then his father is in a hospital full of sick soldiers with pipes coming out of them or walking around in their pyjamas and dressing gowns. While their mother sees their father and all his pipes Thomas helps his big brother find cigarette packets in the hospital rubbish bins because Thomas’s brother collects ones he doesn’t already have and cuts out the fronts and sticks them in a big book.
And that’s all Thomas remembers about the War Time except that there was a lot of coming and going.
When the War Time ends it’s called the Peace Time. It doesn’t really last all that long but it’s got a lot in it because it just keeps on being full of coming and going. Thomas’s father doesn’t come home he just visits. But Lofty the soldier lives in the house and Thomas’s uncle and aunt go down the street a bit to live and after a while Thomas and his two brothers and Thomas’s mother and Lofty all pack up and move to a house in the hills and that’s when the Peace Time ends and Thomas’s Early Time ends and he starts being a kid and an Explorer.
© T. R. Edmonds 2008
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