An Uneducated View of Sex, Food and Politics - Derek Haines (beach read book .TXT) 📗

But it was the only safe one. It was a process of questions and answers and the application of logic. Where do babies come from? Simple. This question’s answer went unchallenged for a number of years, because the answer around our school was so logical. From the navel of course! Why else would it be there? It seemed safe to assume also, given that we knew that mothers had babies, because Dad’s didn’t go to hospital, that girls navel’s must have some special qualities. It must just open up or something!
Satisfied with this fact, now clearly established and beyond doubt, we added the known fact that babies drank milk from breasts. Most of us had baby brothers or sisters and had seen this happen. This fact just added weight to our understanding so far. Boys had these small nipple things the same as girls, but the girl’s ones must be special. Like the navel. Easy. All locked away. Mystery solved.
Until, someone threw a spanner in the works. I believe if my memory is correct, I was around ten years old when this bombshell hit. A girl had heard her mother getting very angry with her older sister. Her sister was fifteen. She had been caught by her mother kissing a boy! Now, the bombshell was this. The younger sister heard her mother explain to her elder sister, that kissing a boy could lead to her getting pregnant.
Well! This was news. Yes, we knew what pregnant was. Mum with fat tummy and baby. But we had not figured on this new angle. Babies didn’t just happen. The woman GOT pregnant. And by KISSING! Boy, now we were on the track of something entirely new. In a few days we had the bugs in the theory worked out. Ones such as, why didn’t you get pregnant when you got kissed by a relative. This was easily explained by a girl in grade seven, who was obviously more mature and hence wiser than us underlings. (We all figured this because we could make out ‘bumps’ on her chest under her school jumper.) She explained, that you only got pregnant if the boy put his tongue in the girl’s mouth. Since relatives did not do this, we accepted her explanation as gospel. At last I believed, as I am sure many of my mates did, that we had this mystery completely solved.
Back to the time of the infamous bathtub incident. A little before in fact. Curiosity is I believe a wonderful quality in any one. It drives us on an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. This surely is a good thing. Still at an age, (five I think) when I believed my parent’s best endeavours at openness and attempts to educate me with the open invitation of, “If you want to know something, just ask”, I accepted the invitation. Not familiar with the concept of ‘good timing’, I chose the time to be when I was seated in the back seat of the car, with Mum driving. She had just picked me up from kindergarten, and one of her girlfriends was seated in the passenger seat. She lived next door to us, and Mum gave her a lift from time to time to and from her job. My timing also coincided with the moment my Mum was driving up a steep hill called Mount Misery. I believe with the aid of hindsight, that my Mum was also a little nervous about driving at that time, but had no choice, as my dad was away working. So it was at this moment that I took up the open invitation.
“Mum?”
“Yes Derek.”
“What does fuck mean?”
This was the point that I believe we nearly had the family car plummet down the almost full height of Mount Misery. The rest of my memory of the incident is a bit scratchy, apart from the fact that I did not get a satisfactory answer to my question. A giggle from my Mum’s girlfriend is a vivid memory though.
A full and clear explanation and meaning of fuck would have to wait. It would be a long time coming.

******

I lived in a small country town in 1962 at age six. A new State Housing Commission house in a new State Housing Commission area was my home. It was built of asbestos, which in 1962 was a wonderful building material and allowed for the modern look of my new home. I do remember it being called a ‘contemporary’ design. How wonderful! (It would be a couple of decades yet before asbestos was declared a substance that could kill from the damage asbestos fibres could do to lungs. Descriptions of painful and agonising death from exposure to asbestos would not hit the newspapers until well after I vacated this house.) It would be over a year after moving in to our new contemporary, modern State House that the road on which we lived was sealed with bitumen.
It was however a great location to be six years old. So many other kids my age to play with. (My sister was only one then, and totally useless as far as playing with went.) Collecting cow beetles, climbing trees, breaking other kid’s toys and them breaking mine, and crying all the way home to Mum. And once composure had been recovered, back to the fold, for a cow beetle race.
There was also much discussion and gossip to be undertaken and possibly understood. All the news of the suburb. Topics were of a general ‘finding out about life’ type subject, and would range from a new puppy to a new brother or sister, through to why girls cry when you hit them, or how many crackers you had bought for ‘Cracker Night’.One particular topic of gossip though, was number one on the list for many, many months. This engrossing mystery was called ‘The Dutch House’.
29 Cracker Night was called Guy Fawkes Night in my childhood. It was a family fireworks night to celebrate the attempt by Guy Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London. It has been said that Guy Fawkes was the only man ever to enter Parliament with a positive intent!
The ‘Dutch House’ was a house exactly the same as every other house in the street. Contemporarily built in asbestos, with a low slung post and rail chain mesh front fence. Painted in a pastel yellow being the only way to differentiate it from the other houses. Some were painted in pastel blue, pastel green or for some lucky families, pastel mauve. The reason the ‘Dutch House’ had gained such a rapid notoriety, was because every parent in the street was talking about the ‘Dutch House’ in secretive whispers. Whispers that we children overheard in small and fragmented pieces. It was our task as a group to try and piece together our collective fragments so as to discover what the mystery and intrigue was all about. The intrigue was of course amplified by our collective parent’s warnings not to go near the ‘Dutch House’.
Our first solid fact discovered, was that it was called ‘That Dutch House’ by our parents, because it was occupied by a recently immigrated Dutch couple. We all knew what an ‘immigrant was, but we did not know where this country called Dutch actually was, because it did not rate a mention in our school atlases. This was the beginning of a perplexing mystery. We did wonder whether this Dutch country could in fact be on another planet. This concept was not totally accepted, but nor was it totally and categorically rejected. On many occasions we would ‘stake out’ the ‘Dutch House’ by hiding from view, and spy on the occupants as they arrived home from work. They were indeed mysterious people. They spoke a gibberish we had never heard. Sounds from the throat we overheard, we tried to copy, but we always sounded like we were just choking.
A new phrase was added to the mystery when the girl next door said she heard her Mum and Dad say that they had ‘Wife Swapping Parties’ at the ‘Dutch House’. Now this was a concept for a lot of discussion. ‘Wife Swapping’. What could this mean? For days and weeks we discussed the various possibilities that could arise from this notion. One of the first conclusions was that if our Dads swapped their wife, that would mean we would have someone else’s Mum to cook dinner for us. This we thought was good logic. And if this happened, would our new Mum know what we liked to eat? Would she know how to use the washing machine? Would she drive us to school? What if our new Mum did not drive? So many questions to answer.
Would our new, temporary Mum bring her own clothes or use Mum’s? Would Dad give her a kiss when he left for work each morning? We sniggered at this thought!
Our list of questions, including where the country Dutch was, would not be answered. The topic of the ‘Dutch House’ faded into memory when the ‘Dutch Couple’ moved from the suburb.
Only in later life, when reminded of this, did I realise that this poor young couple had been painted with a brush of ignorant stereotyping by a suburb of small minded immature people. They had left because they had been victimised by the residents of the suburb. Their attempt at a new life thwarted by ignorance and the self righteousness of naïve gossiping men and women. To be Dutch in 1960’s Geraldton naturally meant that you practised wife swapping. That is what Dutch people did. Everyone knew that. Very few, if any, knew that Dutch people came from a country called the Netherlands. Some had heard of Holland, but would never have made the connection.

******

Since arriving in Australia just over two years ago, my Morticia, my girlfriend-lover-de facto-wife-etc, noticed that making new friends was taking on a definite tilt. She had made many men friends, but had found the going tough with women. She became confused as to why, although polite and courteous, women kept a distance. An invisible screen that she could not break through. She raised the subject one evening, and spoke of her frustration and confusion.
I replied to her that the answer was very simple. Being Swiss, from Geneva, with a distinctive French accent she was immediately recognised as French. Now the stereotypical French woman, to a typical mid-aged Australian woman is of course a woman addicted to love and sex. She knows this because she has seen French movies in which French women always appear naked at some point in the movie, and read books with characters who have been French. Mills and Boon and such like romance novels are full of these wonderfully stereotypical French female characters. They are all and always love and sex driven. She also knows for a fact, that French women ooze natural sex appeal that is irresistible to any male. The equation of French female equalling nymphomaniac is therefore proved true. And when encountered, she is someone of which to be very wary.
The Australia male of course is not slow at mathematics. He knows the same equation! Derived from similar reliable sources to his Australian equivalent female.
French female =Nymphomaniac!
Will our country (and others) ever rid itself of naïve and ignorant stereotyping?

******

Life is just one big mystery. Anyone who claims to know it all, and has the confidence to say that they are in no doubt or confusion about anything at all on the subject of life or living or society or tax law is either a liar, or a politician. In my experience it is very difficult to tell the difference between a liar and a politician. I can only profess this probable difference. A politician is paid from the public purse