Читать книгу A Life of Pride - Alan G Pride - Страница 12

Sometimes Mum also took me on the train all the way to Sydney, to stay with my dad’s family in inner-city Balmain. It was very much a working-class area then. Dad had been born there in 1886, one of eight or nine children. He’d left home early because of his father’s alcoholism, putting himself through tech and helping his mother out with money, then gone away working. By 1920 he was in Adelaide, doing powerhouse maintenance at Adelaide Electrical Supply, but his five brothers stayed around Balmain, working I think in the coal mines which ran under Sydney Harbour.

His father, George Pride, had been a draftsman for the CSR sugar refinery in White Bay, but was dead or otherwise absent by the time Mum and I visited. His mother, Alice, lived in a terrace house in Llewellyn St, with her daughter, Louie, and Louie’s husband, Herb O’Brien.

People were used to living in crowded houses then. Louie used the back of the terrace as a workroom, sewing hundreds of pre-cut shirts together for a company called Hemco. Herb was retired with a bad back, but that didn’t stop him working from home as an SP bookie, even installing a home phone – a rarity at the time.

I hero-worshipped him a bit because he’d spend time with me, unlike my father. He told me all about hunting rabbits with ferrets. I took notes on the design of ferret cages, but never did keep any (Mum would probably have objected to the smell).

He took me on the tram to the nearby Darling Street wharf, to swim and fish. We’d catch garfish, leather jackets and bream. There were barges moored nearby, laden with timber for the sawmills and I’d go diving off these, as I’d been taught to do in New Guinea. Herb rigged fishing lines for us both and probably made the fish- spear which I carried on the ferry, from Darling Street wharf to Milson’s Point, in search of bigger fish.

No way would you be allowed to carry a long spear on a ferry now! It was wonderful to swim around, diving down and hurling the spear at the big fish (I never did hit any).

The trams running along Darling Street were great fun too, especially when I was allowed to ride them alone to the wharf and back. Because of the steep hills, the trams were hooked onto an underground trolley, which acted as a brake on the way down and pulled them back to the hilltop on the return trip.

Herb and Mum also took me to Manly Beach and to Luna Park, with its huge slippery-dip. I loved the coast and started to think that I’d rather live in a place like Sydney, or the green Mt. Keira, than the deserts of Broken Hill.