The Story Continues. 1 Cloak-man

By popular demand, I continue here the story started in my recent ‘Australia 1975’ series of posts. If you haven’t read that yet, you'll find the first instalment here.

As ever, let me know what you think of this, and whether you want me to continue.

 

 Autumn 1977
 

The first time I saw him was in the bar of Cornwall House where I was sipping warm white wine with my friend and housemate Alison.
 
I’d met up with my parents in Sydney and trailed round after them through a succession of lunches and teas with posh Australians who could have been English. They looked and sounded just the same.
    Why my parents wanted me there with them, I couldn’t imagine, as I didn’t contribute anything to the proceedings, feeling as alien as I always had both in England and with those sort of people. I didn’t condemn the people. I blamed myself. My head started to ache.
    I went with my parents to the airport to see them off and as we approached the departure gate both my mother and I started to cry. My father hovered awkwardly. He was obviously upset too but he was old-fashioned. It was women’s job to cry and men’s job to look after them.
    I returned to Hampo and Charles’s house where I was staying and spent a week or so writing off for work – probably being an awful nuisance to the family, but they never made me feel that way. But my heart wasn’t in it. Something had changed. Australia had lost its magic.

    Was it that I didn't feel safe any more, that even though Australia was the far side of the world I could still be found?

    Was it duty that called, or pity for my parents?

    Or did I feel deep down that my time in Australia had come to an end, and that for some reason it was time to go back?

    Whatever the reason, I didn't think too much about it. I acted on instinct and followed my parents home.

 
England seemed very small and cramped after Australia – small houses, small people, small landscapes. Having been wearing sarongs and flip-flops for six months, I couldn’t get used to wearing proper clothes and shoes. It was so formal. So stiff. My real self began to retreat again.
    I did some temporary secretarial work, bicycling from my parents' house in Kent near London every day, and then got a summer job living in and working at a pub on the Norfolk coast. After egalitarian Australia, the conditions were a shock. We were treated like serfs and not fed properly. My eating returned to being erratic, I filled up on bread and chips, and I started to put back on all the weight I'd lost in Australia.
    While I was at home in Kent, before I went to Norfolk, I sorted through the load of stuff I’d brought back from London the year before and dumped in my bedroom at my parents’. Everything was in a terrible muddle. There was a huge pile of papers, and admin to be caught up with.

    In the pile I came across a letter from one of my tutors from my first year at university.

    ‘We’re sorry to see you go, but if you ever change your mind, do get in touch.’
    Yes! I thought. What a nice letter. That’s what I can do – finish my degree.

    Except when I was in Australia, I hadn’t stopped feeling bad for dropping out of ‘uni’, as I now called it Aussie-style. Perhaps I could redeem that chapter in my life.

    In any case, I realised now that I had to have a degree if I wasn’t to carry on doing menial work for the rest of my life. Not that I'd minded menial work in Australia, but it wasn't the same back in England.

    And I had my savings from Australia. They would help even if I didn’t get a grant.
    The university welcomed me back. I was to repeat year one and at the same time proceed with year two.
 
I was now at the start of my third and final degree year at Exeter university, living in a city house with Alison and three males. I hadn’t done much except study the previous year, seeing as I had so much catching up to do, but that was all right. I wasn’t at university for the social life this time. I was there to get a qualification. It didn’t matter what the people were like.

   The first time I went to university I'd had such high hopes. Now I didn't have any. It made it a lot easier.

    It was a rowdy night at Cornwall House, the university’s new social centre. Sound bounced off the high brick walls and the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was hard to talk. Alison and I sipped our wine in silence and watched the goings-on.

    At a nearby table a group of males – rugby types – were taking off their trousers and showing their behinds. They thought it was hilarious. But nobody else did. They ignored them.

    People hurried past to and from the library or their university accommodation, banging their way into and out of the cloakrooms and launderette next to us.

    ‘Anoraks’ (male science students with few social skills) and ‘wellies’ (rich students with cars who lived outside the city in country cottages). Denim and beige. Loud voices. Hellos and goodbyes.

The man swooshed into a chair at an empty table opposite Alison and me. He was wearing a red-velvet floor-length cloak with a hood. He flung the folds of the voluminous garment around him and peeped mischievously out from under the hood, as if daring people to engage with him but keeping his options open by disguising himself inside the cloak. A few straggles of long hair escaped from the hood. He was on his own.

    Exeter was a small university at the time with probably only a few thousand students. Almost everything took place on the campus so you got to know most faces. I hadn’t come across this man before.
    And I hoped not to come across him again. A nutter, I decided. Best avoided.
    And that was that.
    Or so I thought.

Ellie RIP

 23 June 2010 to 26 January 2026

Aren't I sweet

I just have to keep on digging, and I'll get there eventually

Why do I have to be squashed in the front of this car?

How do I get at those ducks?

This snow stuff makes me go a bit mad

There's nothing better than a good sleep . . .

. . . a good view . . .

. . . a winter's dawn . . .

. . . a friend . . .

. . . a long walk on Dartmoor . . .

. . . a good paddle . . .

. . . having my picture taken . . .

. . . and being filmed

AUSTRALIA 1975. 10 'I'll be back'

My father worked as a commodity broker in the City of London in a family company started by his great-uncle Leo. Leo was a Jewish immigrant at the start of the twentieth century who went out to the South Seas, visiting all the islands and arranging to buy their ‘copra’ (part of the inside of the coconut) which he then sold to soap manufacturers for its oil.

    My father continued the practice, travelling round the Pacific every few years to renew friendships and contracts, sometimes with my mother who loved sun and heat like me. The islanders called him Mr John and still spoke of Mr Leo and Mr Roy (my grandfather). Australia was part of the itinerary.
 
The letter was from my mother.
    ‘We’re coming out to Australia,’ she wrote. ‘Your father’s doing one of his tours. Can we meet up in Sydney?’
 
What? This was the first I’d heard of the trip even though my mother and I had been corresponding regularly on thin blue ‘aerogrammes’ ever since I’d left the UK. My father’s trips took months to organise and were usually planned years in advance.
    They were coming out to get me back, I knew it.
    But how could I refuse to see them?
    I couldn’t.
 
All my friends came up to the airstrip to see me off and I hugged them all good bye.
    ‘I’ll be back,’ I called as I climbed into the waiting plane.
    Of course I would, one way or another. This was just a fleeting visit down south.
 
I watched out of the plane window as the moss-like archipelago faded from view, and steeled myself for the return to civilisation.

Next instalment

AUSTRALIA 1975. 9 The Letter

Christmas was approaching and each day the weather became hotter. Then the wind grew. And grew. A cyclone was on its way, due to hit us directly. The boats were moved round to the other side of the island and we were advised to go to bed with our clothes on. I took my notebook with me too, clutched to my chest. I wasn’t having anyone else getting their hands on that.

    The next day we woke to the world as normal. The cyclone had changed direction at the last minute and missed us.

    Having heard all about The Darwin Cyclone (which was presumably a particularly ferocious one as it was talked about so much), I was astonished at how calmly the whole incident had passed. Stalwart people, these Aussies.

 
A single cannabis plant grew outside the cabin I shared with Di. I had no idea how it got there as cannabis was not widespread. Alcohol was the drug of choice. Alan however usually had a stash in the caravan where he and Jayne lived and sometimes he shared it.
    One evening he and I lay outside looking up at the stars and had a cosmic conversation. I was thrilled. I’d been wanting cosmic conversations all my life. Ever since I was six in fact when I became terrified of eternity and wondered if God would make an exception in my case and allow me to be extinguished completely. Goodness knows what was going on there.
 
As the heat grew so did the guest numbers, and I fell ill, waking with dripping sheets every morning. On my third day in bed, Jayne came up to see me and said, ‘I’ve never known anyone spend so long in bed.’ I did feel bad about deserting the other waitresses just when they were at their busiest, but there was nothing I could do.
    When I recovered I’d lost half a stone and was now over a stone lighter than I'd been in London. My weight was almost normal. With no conscious effort on my part, it had been dropping slowly throughout my time at Lindeman. This was partly because there was no opportunity to binge-eat and partly because I didn’t want to. And the diet was healthy and simple. Australian beef – there was a whole room filled with carcasses tenderising, fish caught daily from around the island, and salads which we waitresses made every morning before breakfast.
 
For Christmas Day, I spent a chunk of my savings and booked a call home. On the day, I stood in line waiting for my turn at the island’s one telephone. The call woke my parents in the middle of the night but I thought they were pleased to hear from me even though my father passed me over to my mother as soon as possible, as he always did, and my mother spent the whole time crying.
 
After Christmas the rains began. Tiny yellow-green parakeets lay around on their backs, made drunk by the rotting fruit. A landslide deposited several inches of mud at the doors of the staff cabins. Guest numbers started to fall. Staff started to leave.
    I’d been in Australia ten months now. My working-holiday visa would expire in two but that didn’t matter. Many people were working in the country illegally (and a little later the government was to extend an amnesty to them all so that it could bring records up to date). I began to have vague dreams of a little house in the bush. Me writing.
    I had plenty of money now – more than enough to pay my father back for the plane ticket. Probably enough in fact to live for a year without working. So that part of my Australian adventure was done.
 
Then I received a letter.

Next instalment

AUSTRALIA 1975. 8 The Great Barrier Reef

I enjoyed my waitressing work on Lindeman Island. We had no boss. We simply organised ourselves, with the waitresses who’d been there longer teaching those who were newer.

    Lach (pronounced 'Lock') the quiet Scotsman who ran and once owned the hotel never emerged from his office. I only saw him once. The whole place seemed to run itself.

    Lunch was a barbecue and to start with – until Bob lent me some green flip-flops (‘thongs’ in Australian and ‘jandals’ in New Zealandish) - I worked in bare feet. I couldn't imagine that happening in England.
    We washed and dried the cutlery by hand and sometimes Jayne and I would dance round the kitchen, waving the tea towels like veils. Even Jon, the miserable chef, would laugh.

    From the dining-room in the evenings I could watch the flying foxes swarming in to roost in the trees. After supper while I cleared my tables I could hear Alan at the organ or the band which came over from Mackay once a week and played covers of current pop songs. Later in  the evening, we staff did silly dances to the music and cooled off in the pool while the guests looked on enviously.

     Even though many of the guests were illustrious - diplomats, actors, musicians - or just plain rich, we mixed with them and enjoyed the same facilities. We weren't a sub-species as we would have been back in the UK. I loved that. It was how things should be.

    Sometimes however the mixing went further than I could have imagined. I arrived back from a day of mystical daydreaming on Plantation Beach to find the hotel in an uproar. The famous - or infamous - Bay City Rollers had dropped in and one of the housemaids had gone to a beach with one of them and Had Sex. I was shocked. She was so quiet normally. 

  

When I first arrived we wore our own clothes for work but, as the place smartened up and a new dining-room was opened, uniforms were made in a tropically patterned material, with shirts for the men and dresses for the women – short blue ones in the day and long red ones at night.

We waitresses in our new evening dresses. I'm in the middle at the back. Jayne is far right.

 

The barmen in their new shirts. George is on the left with his hand on Helen's shoulder.

 
This was a relief as I only had one summer dress and I was fed up with washing it every night.

Me in my one summer dress and a borrowed cap, shortly after I first realised that I was happy on Lindeman

One day Jane and I hitched a lift in the plane and went to Mackay to buy some clothes. Doobie came with us and tried to squeeze through a small round ventilation hole in the window. Jane grabbed her rear end just in time.

    There was one clothes shop in Lindeman and Jayne and I almost cleaned it out. We bought a bikini - tiny white-and-blue-striped triangles - in two different sizes and swapped over the bits as Jane was bigger on her top than her bottom and I was the other way round. It worked well.

    I'd never spent so much on clothes all at once, but with the heat I needed frequent changes and my savings were building up nicely. Wages were good and my only expenses were in the bar.

    

Jayne and Doobie

Alan borrowed a boat and Jayne, Alan, Doobie and I zoomed over to the uninhabited island. Doobie stood in the prow, her long hair flying in the wind. She looked like a film star and she knew it.

    As we explored the wild terrain Jane said sniffily, ‘If this was Greece there’d be a nice taverna round the corner.’

   Jayne had travelled all over before landing up in Australia and had reached unexplored places like Greece which was not visited by tourists because of ‘The Colonels’ and their military dictatorship. I didn't know what a 'taverna' was, although I could guess.
    The tide went out and to get back we had first to pull the boat through half a mile of shallow water across sharp coral. I cut one of my feet, it became infected and I had to bathe it every night for a week in salt water.

    We were pioneers. We looked after ourselves.
 
At last it was my turn to see the Barrier Reef itself. We travelled by night, with staff sleeping on the deck and guests down below. I didn’t sleep much. It was all too beautiful. The next day we were offloaded on to a plateau covered with water a few inches deep. Again, we had strict instructions not to touch anything, not only because it was protected but also because everything was poisonous, if not deadly.
    I wandered around in borrowed plimsolls, not knowing quite what to do. I looked over the edge of the plateau and the reef fell away to bottomless blue. I thought I saw a shark cruising way down and stepped back hurriedly.
    Some people were snorkelling, but I didn't know how to.
 
Jayne and I wrote and distributed a satirical newsletter which we called ‘Lindeman Stinks’. Bob thought it was funny but Lach was apparently upset. I was upset that he was upset. He was a nice man. Didn’t he realise that ribbing was the way Australians showed affection? The more they liked you, the more they teased you.   
    There was a song doing the rounds. George was the ringleader.
 
    My sister Belinda
    She pissed out the winda . . .
 
Luckily, I can’t remember the rest. I was pleased to be famous.
    I was teased for using words over two syllables which of course with my bookish leanings I often did. Everything was abbreviated in Australian – cozzie (bathing costume), mozzie (mosquito), smoko (work break), arvo (afternoon). It took me a while to understand the lingo.

A rather sad member of staff (the person who lent me the cassette of Scarlatti), a gay barman who didn’t last long on the island, said that I was ‘bubbling over with happiness’. I was. I walked into the laundry room one day with my sweaty sheets and as I bunged them into a machine I thought, it doesn’t matter what I’m doing. Every moment is alive.

 
For some reason Helen and I decided one night to climb to the top of the island.
 

Helen, en route to the top of the island. I think she's down to her underwear. It was very hot by now, even at night.

 
We arrived as dawn was breaking. Green cone-shaped islands, steaming gently in the early morning sun, dotted the ocean all around. It was like the birth of the planet.

Next instalment