Back to School
7
Back to School
‘I see you’ve got one of those dreadful cars!’, Mrs Webb announced as soon as she opened her Nantes St door in Newtown, a nice suburb of Geelong. I had been given her address at the Gordon Tech office when enquiring about private board. Her husband, Ted Webb, was a well-respected sheep and wool representative who worked for a Geelong wool broker, and spent much of his time calling on clients in Victoria’s Western District. He as away most week days and came home for weekends. The Webb’s son, Robert, and daughter had both left home and worked in Melbourne, but came home some weekends. I went back to Melbourne to visit my mum and dad some weekends too, so this arrangement worked tolerably well except in winter, when Robert Webb and I both played football for Geelong Amateurs. It wasn’t until the next day that I discovered the genesis of the “dreadful car” remark. Early that morning, I heard another MG TC start up in Nantes street just a couple of houses away. Its exhaust had been doctored to the extent that it sounded considerably more raucous than mine did since its Mt Isa refit, and I could imagine the impact that it would have on quiet little Nantes St late at night. Despite the inauspicious start, Mrs Webb and I got on quite well, and I’m sure that the other Webbs were reassured that she had a male around the house, particularly at night, while they were all away. If I recall correctly, this private board cost me five pounds ($10) a week, and dad kindly gave me seven pounds to cover this and everything else, without which I’d have been battling to get by. I had a budget worked out which, I do recall, included a counter lunch and one glass of beer in Geelong each Friday. When I got to know the manager a bit better, I enquired about a part-time bar job, and was pleasantly surprised to get a job at a time when jobs had become scarce. One of the best aspects of the wool-classing course was that the theoretical and practical study went through until about July, and then we were all consigned to a run of shearing sheds as paid rouseabouts until about December. This was primarily to give us some practical understanding of shed work, rather than the monetary consideration, as most of the lads were sons of sheep graziers. This was not the case as far as I was concerned, as I had expenses to meet that could not be wrung out of the seven pounds a week that Dad provided. Before my first run, I realized that I simply had no footwear suitable for shed work. My recent dozing and mining activities required heavy boots, and I only had my good shoes as an alternative. When shearers were broke and bootless, they sometimes used to make do with “bag boots”, stitched together out of hessian or jute, a practice that would not be allowed these days due to the possibility of fibre pollution of the wool clip. However, such a garb on a trainee wool-classer would certainly have proved embarrassing. What to do? Well, I’d spotted a very nice pair of leather shearers’ moccasins in a Geelong boot store for seven pounds, but when I checked my wallet, seven pounds was all I had in the world. If I bought the shoes, I couldn’t pay for petrol to get to my first shed, right up in the Wimmera district 69