My parents were both honest, hard-working Anglo-Saxons who taught me that the daily grind is a blessing from God, although they didn't really believe in that which was invisible.
They believed in the plum tree and the dinner plates and the incredible healing power of laughter.
They had the luck to be born funny and now they are no more, life has become too serious unless I am in company with Italians from Reservoir, where I was born to be happy.
Our neighbours still live at the rear of my mother and father’s double brick residence in Rathcown Road, and although in their eighties, they are crowned with life and very talkative and passionate about what they have to say... You name it: politics or the latest dramatic information in regard to their tomatoes.
When I was a teenager, the husband Mike used to put his damaged palm on the dividing paling fence and chat to me about painting and drawing, and he always gave my father olive oil, herbs and fresh dark and mysterious plums off his leafy trees.
A month ago, I was lucky enough to have the opening night of a new show of charcoal drawings in Regent.
To my amazement, Mike and his wife turned up and recalled my late mother, Edna Dickins, who died a few years ago of everything.
They spoke so tenderly; it was similar to going back in time and having my mother present in our merry midst.
I asked politely what had happened to his palm with the missing fingers and Mike said there was a terrible mishap at a glass factory; and there was so much of his blood everywhere.
The next second, his wife spoke entirely of my mother in such a vivid kind of way she was alive again no doubt.
I hadn’t seen Mike or his friendly wife for years; in fact, the last time that happened, I was walking with my older brother, John, past their home and they invited us both in to afternoon tea.
She served up home cooked biscuits made of almond and milk and we talked a great deal about all sorts of things.
The intimacy was automatic and the comedy and tragedy on tap.
When I was about 14, I used to be a newspaper deliverer in Reservoir and got paid 10 shillings per week to personally place newspapers rolled up into housing commissions, mostly jagged tin letter boxes.
We delivered The Sun Pictorial in those days, the early ’60s, and you had to keep an eye out for quite unpredictable street dogs that drooled for any available portion of your young and eager body.
Even then, all those years back, I honestly preferred Italian homes that were covered with inspiring olive plants and all sorts of orange trees and my favourite fruit, which is lime.
Those places just seemed more welcoming than the grumpy weatherboard homes belonging to uptight Caucasians who wouldn’t even let you have a drink out of their tap.
In their kitchens, you smelt homemade grappa and delicious cheeses as opposed to Kraft Cheddar, which was what our family existed on for over 70 years.
The main feed in our home was thick sliced Kraft Cheddar melted atomically into tomatoes on Tip Top white toast, covered with white pepper and cut in half.
The Italian homes were raucous too, unlike our place that was always loving, but you never raised your voice because that’s offensive.
The Italians who used to live next door to my mum and dad all through the ’70s and ’80s were called Sammy and Maria and they were just as nice as Mike and his wife up the top end of our backyard.
Sam used to place netting over his fig trees and hand my mum a big bag of them when they were ripe and uneaten by the birds who loved figs as much as we did in the old days.
My dad would stand on the seat by the rock barbecue he and I constructed together so many decades ago, when the gossip was there was a gold rush down the bottom of Rathcown Road, Reservoir.
I used to have a tin trolley with lovely white rubber wheels on it and my father and I found boulders and rocks in the creek and trundled them all home in order to build our barbecue; it was from this vantage point that dad talked sometimes for ages with Sammy who used to shield his eyes from the sun in autumn when it got hotter than either of them thought.
Sammy’s wife, Maria, loved chatting to my mother and they often chuckled at this and that as both were effortless storytellers and mimics.
Just leaving Reservoir behind for a moment, this memory comes from Fitzroy and Egremont Street, which runs off Scotchmer Street.
I used to be friends with an Italian man named Louis, with whom I played tennis every Saturday for The Fitzroy Tennis Club.
He always made me welcome in the early 1970s at their tiny cottage after a match and I used to love playing with the tennis ball with his two-year-old son.
We even played tennis together in country towns like Daylesford; Lou and I sometimes won a match our two in the bush tournaments and there was always on offer the enjoyment of hitting the ball to his toddler son and even carrying him around the picnic area housed upon my young strong shoulders.
I suppose I was about 22 at the time of this story, but I remember it because of its Italianness.
One day I walked along old Egremont Street in Fitzroy to their home in order to go to tennis with Louis like normal; only when his wife came to the door to my polite knock, she was all black in the face as if she’d been hit by something of great force.
She had been, for it was death that had hit her.
Her little boy had drowned at the beach, she told me through her cascading display of mothering tears, adding these words: “Sorry Barry! Sorry Barry!”
I cried also like a tap on a railway platform as it was my first serve of grief.
I just stared back at Lou’s wife and her rich black eyes, so swollen, so wet and puffed up from days of crying.
Lou wasn’t home, she said.
I hugged her in my fashion as best I could and left for the Saint Georges Road tram to go back to Reservoir again.
I once worked for Bisleri The Lemonade Factory in Keon Park during school holidays.
I was only a boy at this stage of the game and my job was to add at high speed the various tints to the lemonade and assist in the department that hit the bottle tops on the very slippery bottles.
It wasn’t hard work but you got pretty filthy doing it what with all the grease, rapid fire flavourings and hot steam.
The noise itself was pretty overwhelming, I have to say, but the most outstanding thing of the lot was having to wrestle all the Italian labourers: once a week it was our pay day and they eagerly formed teams and in a pretty impressive but rough-as-bags manner, they wrestled each other to a standstill.
They applied grease all over their powerful bodies and they pointed at me and said very gruffly, “You!”, and that was it.
You just had to do it on no uncertain terms and I used to come home to my mum and dad’s place sore and aching in each joint and reeking of Bisleri, which I greatly liked ... Especially Chinoto!
It would of course seem strange that a man born to white Caucasian people, who has always been faithful and loving towards his ancestors, would want to be Italian.
Of course, I am not and never could be, but it is the passion and the powerful persuasiveness that both enlightens and instructs me when I’m with Italians that really anything at all seems likely ... Even the writing of a spontaneous play or opera is on the cards if you play them right.
It’s all very well to draw in chiaroscuro, but I think that Italians talk that way too!
