failed a class and Mike always came top in art and music while I generally came in the top half, sometimes even close to the top of the class, and in biology and science I was never beat.
Considering we were half asleep all the time, it wasn't too bad really. Mike didn't play much sport, only when it was compulsory, but Bozo and me were good at footy and cricket and Sarah was captain of the girls' hockey and basketball teams and played for the state in the Australian Inter-Schools Hockey Tournament.
As we grew a bit older, our sporting endeavours saved us a lot of abuse. Nobody would pick on Bozo who was already the state amateur
champion in his weight division and was going to represent Country Victoria in the National Police Boys Club Championships in Sydney later in the year. Big Jack said that his coach, Bobby
'Rock Fist' Devlin, the ex-Victorian welterweight contender, thought Bozo was a certainty for a gold medal. That he might even make it to the Olympic Games next year. But Nancy said not to count your chickens. It was kind of strange with Bozo being, like, Big Jack Donovan's favourite boy boxer and him being the son of a crim who, more often than not, was arrested by Sergeant Donovan and charged and placed under remand. But then life is strange, I suppose.
I'd better line us Maloneys up, because if you work it out, given his years as a prisoner of war in Borneo, Tommy Maloney couldn't be the daddy of all of us. Sarah was the eldest and was seventeen in 1955, born a year before the war was declared. Tommy, wanting to get away from the farm, decided to join the permanent army and was doing his training at Broadmeadows in Melbourne. She was shotgun number one, the result of a weekend leave pass. Nancy, who was doing her nurse's training at the time, said Sarah was definitely Tommy's daughter, because he was her first and it happened after the Women's Auxiliary Dance when Tommy offered to walk her back to Mrs Frost's boarding house. She laughs when she tells how they never got any further than the concealment of the bushes beside Lake Sambell.
Nancy's dad reckoned that with a bun in the oven growing bigger by the day her nursing career was over anyway, so he took Nancy back to their dairy farm at Allan's Flat to hide the family shame and to keep a sharper eye on his daughter in future. As it turned out, he proved to be a pretty lousy watchdog.
When Tommy was confronted with the prospect of fatherhood, he Pointed out that he needed the permission of his company commander to marry and several weeks later reported that the big brass had put
trt 111
e kybosh on a young soldier marrying because he'd got some girl up e duff. Tommy even showed Nancy's old man his application for Permission to marry with a rubber stamp over it that read 'Permission used. The old bloke was too ignorant to know that these
aplication forms with rubber stamp intact could be purchased for two in the sly in any military training establishment. But when war
was declared in 1939 Tommy must have had a sudden softening of the heart, thinking that perhaps he might be killed without offspring, the Maloney name in Yankalillee extinguished forever (not necessarily a bad thing). He'd come to see Nancy on her parents"farm, begging her to give Sarah his name and promising that should he return from the war he would marry her.
Page 36
'Wait for me, Nancy, our little daughter will be
well looked after when I return.' It was about as close as he ever got to saying anything that might vaguely be taken as romantic.
However, Nancy wasn't very good at waiting. She thinks Mike, who is fourteen, was begat by an Italian who worked on her old man's dairy farm and who later, when Italy declared war on us, became a prisoner of war. The government said he could continue to work on the farm, only now he was an enemy alien. So Nancy couldn't be said to have been consorting with the enemy because Mike happened before his father was the enemy. Although, she's not
Considering we were half asleep all the time, it wasn't too bad really. Mike didn't play much sport, only when it was compulsory, but Bozo and me were good at footy and cricket and Sarah was captain of the girls' hockey and basketball teams and played for the state in the Australian Inter-Schools Hockey Tournament.
As we grew a bit older, our sporting endeavours saved us a lot of abuse. Nobody would pick on Bozo who was already the state amateur
champion in his weight division and was going to represent Country Victoria in the National Police Boys Club Championships in Sydney later in the year. Big Jack said that his coach, Bobby
'Rock Fist' Devlin, the ex-Victorian welterweight contender, thought Bozo was a certainty for a gold medal. That he might even make it to the Olympic Games next year. But Nancy said not to count your chickens. It was kind of strange with Bozo being, like, Big Jack Donovan's favourite boy boxer and him being the son of a crim who, more often than not, was arrested by Sergeant Donovan and charged and placed under remand. But then life is strange, I suppose.
I'd better line us Maloneys up, because if you work it out, given his years as a prisoner of war in Borneo, Tommy Maloney couldn't be the daddy of all of us. Sarah was the eldest and was seventeen in 1955, born a year before the war was declared. Tommy, wanting to get away from the farm, decided to join the permanent army and was doing his training at Broadmeadows in Melbourne. She was shotgun number one, the result of a weekend leave pass. Nancy, who was doing her nurse's training at the time, said Sarah was definitely Tommy's daughter, because he was her first and it happened after the Women's Auxiliary Dance when Tommy offered to walk her back to Mrs Frost's boarding house. She laughs when she tells how they never got any further than the concealment of the bushes beside Lake Sambell.
Nancy's dad reckoned that with a bun in the oven growing bigger by the day her nursing career was over anyway, so he took Nancy back to their dairy farm at Allan's Flat to hide the family shame and to keep a sharper eye on his daughter in future. As it turned out, he proved to be a pretty lousy watchdog.
When Tommy was confronted with the prospect of fatherhood, he Pointed out that he needed the permission of his company commander to marry and several weeks later reported that the big brass had put
trt 111
e kybosh on a young soldier marrying because he'd got some girl up e duff. Tommy even showed Nancy's old man his application for Permission to marry with a rubber stamp over it that read 'Permission used. The old bloke was too ignorant to know that these
aplication forms with rubber stamp intact could be purchased for two in the sly in any military training establishment. But when war
was declared in 1939 Tommy must have had a sudden softening of the heart, thinking that perhaps he might be killed without offspring, the Maloney name in Yankalillee extinguished forever (not necessarily a bad thing). He'd come to see Nancy on her parents"farm, begging her to give Sarah his name and promising that should he return from the war he would marry her.
Page 36
'Wait for me, Nancy, our little daughter will be
well looked after when I return.' It was about as close as he ever got to saying anything that might vaguely be taken as romantic.
However, Nancy wasn't very good at waiting. She thinks Mike, who is fourteen, was begat by an Italian who worked on her old man's dairy farm and who later, when Italy declared war on us, became a prisoner of war. The government said he could continue to work on the farm, only now he was an enemy alien. So Nancy couldn't be said to have been consorting with the enemy because Mike happened before his father was the enemy. Although, she's not
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