Creeks and Kitchens - A Childhood Memoir by Gee Maurice

Author:Gee, Maurice
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Maurice Gee, memoir, autobiography, childhood
Publisher: Bridget Williams Books
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

All through our Newington Road days we had visits from two men called Jim and John. They were my mother’s friends. They talked with her about books. Often John came alone. We liked him more than Jim. Jim smelled of eau-de-Cologne, but John played thunderous music on the piano, Finlandia and The Mexican Fire Dance. We stood beside him and marvelled at the blur of his fingers. Mum said he was good enough to be a concert pianist. It was many years before I understood Jim and John were homo­sexuals. My father always went out when they came. His friends were the two local bookies. I liked these men with their roll-your-own cigarettes (Mum rolled her own) and their Best Bets in their hip pockets, but was priggish enough, Chapple enough, to feel superior to them.

So there was home and the Chapple clan and my sense of being special in birth and understanding. There was, too, my passionate embattled puritanism. And outside was the world, the war, school – Avondale College, a half-hour trip by train – and the Henderson pictures on Saturday night, Abbot and Costello and Alan Ladd, and football at which I was pretty good, and swimming at the Falls.

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