Issue 6 2010 - TLS - Victoria University

front and sides, two fingers were put into the waist band and
pulled about, then he would put his hand between my legs and
feel and say, ‘There’s room for growth there Mrs Ryan; there’s
no need to be worried about the fit; what are you in, sixth class,
Paul It won’t be long now.’
And he would look at her and smile, and Mum would hold the
clasp of her handbag with two hands and look at the floor.
‘Thank you, Mr Cooper,’ she’d say.
‘Shall I wrap them for you then Two pairs’
‘Yes, thank you, and Harry will be in on Saturday morning to
pay.’
‘Of course, whenever suits. Do give my best to your mother.’
And it was over until the next time. I knew that as we left he’d
try to ruffle my hair with his hand and I’d duck to get away from
him and he’d wink at me. Mum asked what the trouble was, why
did I do that, and I told her that I didn’t like him; he made me
feel funny. And she said not to be silly, he was just trying to be
friendly. The grey shorts of the state-school kids never seemed
to have the same problem with the shine, they were made by
Crusader and came with a packet of small cards in the pocket; those cards never came with the blue
pants we had to wear.
Mum said that if they were replaced at the right time no one would ever know they had been, but,
if you let them get a bit shiny, then new ones were more obvious. She said that a lot of people were
doing it hard and there was no reason to make it even harder for them by strutting what you could
afford when a lot of people knew they couldn’t do it for their kids. It was being sensitive to other
people’s circumstances, she said.
Once, when she and Dad were talking about new pants for me I heard her say, ‘No one will ever say
behind my back that my son is a shiny bum.’
The wearers of the usual two or three-piece blue serge suits with trouser seats shiny from sitting on a
chair at a desk were privately scorned for having risen above themselves, which really meant that they
had achieved a level of social status that saw them leave their families behind. A waistcoat was the sign
of a bank manager or an owner and often wrapped a big belly, there were no waistcoats in our couple
of blocks, but South Hill, where the doctors lived, had a couple.
‘The worst of the lot of those shiny bums,’ she said, ‘Is that Andrew Grant who works at the College.
His father was an engine driver these forty years and they never visit his parents; not him or his wife,
or any of those three boys of theirs. Never, ever. And they only live a couple of blocks away up the
hill—he can see his dad’s chimney from his side garden for God’s sake! He’s ashamed of where he
came from! Hazz, you know as well as I do that he’s never been seen there since he got married and
his eldest boy was born a couple of days this side of our Paul, and that wife with her ways, he married
up and don’t tell me he didn’t. They never see their grandchildren. It’s a sin.’
‘Now then, Gert,’ Dad would say in his mild way, ‘We don’t know what goes on there, do we’
‘I do and so do a lot of people, particularly with that hussy he works with. No good will come of that,
mark my words.’
‘But…Gertie, Gertie, how can you know this’
‘I have friends who know; one works up there. She has seen them. Dead to rights.’
And with that she drew her cardigan tightly across her chest, buttoned it up and folded her arms.
Page 35