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Me and Pete:
Recalling a Fifties Childhood
cont'd from p.1
The impulse for writing a childhood memoir first came to me while reading Hugh Lunn’s Over the Top with Jim. Before then, it had never entered my head, despite my ever growing inclination to scribble down my thoughts and, more surprisingly, despite my mind constantly returning to my childhood in the compulsive comparison of what happened then with the social life of Australia since the 1970s. There were also the frequent reminiscences I indulged in with Pete who to a large extent still lives in those times. Social and political themes are far from our thoughts during these free ranging reminiscences. Nobody is more non-political than Pete. We carry on laughing and sighing about the same high jinks, the same incidents, the same friends and family. We cannot imagine kids these days having anything like the self-made pleasures and self-organised adventures of our fifties childhood. Nor can we imagine the same consolation of family and friends when most families were made up of a mother and father co-operating with mutual purpose and respect. So, when I thought about it, it did come as a surprise that it had never occurred to me to put it all down on paper. Lunn’s memoir, as I say, changed that. Over the Top with Jim is a now a classic in Australian childhood reminiscence literature, a book that every Australian should read – for its humour and unwitting social history.
Lunn grew up in the suburb of Annerley, just outside Brisbane city centre. Other than a different suburb in a different capital city and a few years difference in age (he is five years older), my story in gross outline would be roughly similar. We both grew up in Catholic families which meant our social environment and social prescriptions were fixed until at least the end of school. I think the success of Lunn’s book is due importantly to the sharp recognition that any Catholic kid of the fifties would experience while reading it, whether not that kid had kept the faith or abandoned it, or was determined to rubbish it forever more. Non-Catholics would be intrigued by a glimpse into what would have been for them the mysterious ways of the Catholic Church and its institutions, many of them thinking Lunn had well and truly confirmed their suspicions about its weirdness.
What precisely sparked the idea of a writing a childhood memoir was the recurring thought while I was reading Over the Top with Jim – coincidentally much of it while...
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