Real and Reel by Brian McFarlane

Author:Brian McFarlane [McFarlane, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography
ISBN: 9781877006579
Publisher: Port Campbell Press

We met just once more after this before running into each other in the Hampstead Post Office (she'd just come to live in a flat a couple of blocks from where I was) on 27 September 1958. I thereafter pursued her with more relentlessness than subtlety, her flatmate suggesting she was being too available to my invitations. From September 1958, the diary entries are full of references to her, and, no, I'm not going to quote them here. Ambitiously I organised a party of six - three women and three men, including one it turned out she was rather taken by - to go to Norway for a fortnight's skiing over Christmas. Well, the party dwindled till there were only Gerie, a university friend, Margaret Stohr, and I left. On the boat to Bergen was a large British colonial party whose hearty leader was called Trevor: I was very moved when Gerie and Margaret unanimously elected me the leader of our party. My first act in this exalted position was to get us off at the wrong station in snowbound Norway, owing to the similarity of two names, and we then had to be taken by sled from the cosy pension I'd brought us to and on to our Youth Hostel destination. Australians did not emerge well at the New Year festivities when Youth of All Nations were performing national song and dance. We could only come up with a defectively-remembered rendering of 'A Bush Christening' with actions. Most of the audience was mystified and Gerie and I retired to drink duty-free brandy to numb our recollections.

Anyway, I knew about courtship from the films, where it always ended happily, so I persisted, and finally broke her will, and persuaded her (in Paris, to be exact) to ally herself with me permanently. We got engaged in Paris, after the first substantial meal I'd treated her to in over a week (could she have agreed out of sheer gratitude?), and clinched this with a ring bought in Vienna, with money borrowed from a friend. I think that's exotic enough. Also in Vienna, remembering MGM's The Great Waltz, with Miliza Korjus trilling away, I felt we needed to visit the real Vienna Woods, and spent an hour or so slithering around in the mud, trying to sing at the same time. Slender, dark-haired and with more than a passing resemblance to Merle but with a mind and a humour distinctly her own, Gerie had been studying acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama for a year. However, she'd decided not to continue after the first year though invited to do so. When we re-met, she was thinking of returning to Australia within six months. That would have been without me, and who knows what competitors would have sought to displace me. I'd been planning to come home later in 1959 via America, but scrapped that idea when I needed the money to repay my friend for the loan to buy the ring in Vienna.

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