Give judgment for me, O God

Me and Pete:
Recalling a Fifties Childhood
Gerard Charles Wilson

The photo left: Me (right) and Pete (left) Christmas time 1949/50

THE OPENING PAGES OF CHAPTER ONE

'IT WAS, I’m pretty sure, in the third week of December, 1960. I remember the morning was bright and sunny, the shimmering summer heat already broiling the suburbs of Sydney. I had arrived home a few days before from boarding school, the Apostolic School run by the MSC fathers at Douglas Park, around fifty miles from Lane Cove, a suburb on the north side of Sydney. I was going to be a priest.

 I do not remember who went with me – except Mr Allison was leading the way. Pete reckons Michael, my older brother, and my two sisters, Marie and Narelle were there, too. Michael says he has absolutely no memory of the occasion and Narelle says she vaguely remembers seeing Pete sometime and somewhere in a hospital bed.

I remember approaching the entrance of a red brick building, climbing narrow stairs behind Mr Allison to the first floor, and next thing standing to the side at the end of a bed, observing Pete flat on his back, his eyes still bandaged. I don’t remember what we said to each other. No doubt we swapped the usual comments, comments that passed unconsciously between two best friends who had known each other all their lives. I just remember staring a little uncomprehendingly at Pete lying rigid in bed, his white bandaged head partially framed by the window to the side, through which the bright summer sun flowed out of a piercing blue sky – a sky that Pete was never to see in such vividness again. I remember saying something to Mr Allison as we left the Royal Prince Alfred's eye ward, something about this latest drama with Pete’s eyes. Then I asked if it was true that Pete had to lie flat on his back for six weeks. I could not get over the idea of having to lie flat on your back for such a long time. Nothing seemed at that time more frightening or impossible.

‘Yes, Gerard, it’s true,’ Pete's dad said, slowing and then putting his hand gently on my shoulder. ‘The doctor has said that he must move as little as possible.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know how he does it, the poor little bloke. He has such courage. He’s borne it all without any complaint. He has not moved.’

In December 1960 Pete was fifteen-years-old. The detached retina in one eye and the glaucoma in both eyes would continue to work cruelly until he was totally blind by 1975. I had turned fourteen in July of that portentous year – 1960. When I look back I see that the two years of boarding school without the comfort and counsel of my mother and father had been unsettling, though I had no idea at the time how critical their absence was or of what preciousness I had turned my back on, not even sparing a glance backwards at pre-1959. I realise now that Pete’s detached retina and glaucoma and my visit to the hospital signalled the drawing of the curtain over the little bright gap that still remained at that point of our childhood – a gap that showed glimpses of acrobatics on balmy summer nights in the front yard, Saturday matinees, my Cyclops and athletic clubs, Pete's slide shows, neighbourhood hikes, hunting cicadas, trips on the tram to Balmoral beach or Sydney’s Olympic pool, Christmas holiday trips to town…and so much else that had made our childhood as happy as anyone could wish.

As I walked in a sombre mood with Mr Allison back to his car, neither of us saying much, I did not know that two years later in December 1962 I would be leaving St Mary’s Towers, the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart’s minor seminary, giving up forever any idea of being a priest. I was told that I did not have a vocation. They didn't have to tell me. As young and stupid as I was, I did realise I was not suited for religious life. Nor did I know that December 1962 would mark the beginning of around five dark years of struggle to understand myself and how I fitted into the world around me, a world that I never felt completely part of or attuned to. I began to come out of those dark years when I unconsciously returned to the moral and social context of my childhood. My mother and father would again be my constant but unspoken guide.  

Reflecting on those long bygone times, I want to put on record the reasons that my childhood and Pete’s was so happy, and how those times contrast so sharply with early twenty-first century. But if failing in what may appear as a grand design, I want at least to tell my children and grandchildren what life was like in Australia in the 1950s, in part offering an explanation for opinions that must seem perverse and mystifying at times... read more of chapter one

The Lane Cove Gang (the Wilson and Allison kids) Christmas time 1949/50 - Pete with the glasses and toy, me with the dopey expression on his left, no doubt in response to Mum telling me to close my mouth. Dad was taking the photo.

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