—By the time I was twelve, I had visited a number of restaurants without having eaten in one. My father, of course, was a sales representative—known as ‘traveller’, as in ‘tinker’ or ‘Gypsy’—for a catering supplies firm, John Dynon and Sons. Its vast showroom in City Road, South Melbourne was a museum of 1960s dining trends.
—I sometimes accompanied him on his field trips. One hot day we were driving through the snarl of humid West Melbourne—Essendon to the city was faster via Macauley Road and Arden Street than down through Moonee Ponds and Ascot Vale—but the horns I heard were not from the traffic but from a new Beatles song curling from the radio.
In the city, my father parked in Lonsdale Street and handed me a shilling for the meter. With Penny Lane still in my head I watched the coin’s ram’s head disappear with an oddly satisfying metallic whirr.
Mid-afternoon. Lonsdale Street was populated mostly by grey suits returning from lunch to the banks or the law courts. Inside the cool arched shadows of The Latin, my father discussed bain maries, vinyl menu holders and monogrammed Steelite crockery with David Triaca, while I sat waiting at a table uncleared of a claret bottle, two half-eaten meals and an ashtray piled with the little dead elbows of Viscount cigarettes. On the corner is a banker with a motor car …
—Another day we are miles away, out of Melbourne, somewhere in the hills, or perhaps Diamond Creek or Eltham. This day my father is a houndstooth-checked presence beside me, his hands light on the colour-keyed steering wheel. The car is new. It dances with the curves and its fresh engine sings like a polite kettle. He says little on the flat open road that flows north-east toward the blue smudge of Kinglake, but he absentmindedly whistles tunes. Everyone whistles, even in television commercials. I wind down the window and lean my head against the pillar, and the forced airflow makes a buffeting sound in my ears like a demonic drum section.
From the radio Desmond Dekker’s reggae-chopped lyrics are flung into the fields. I don’t want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde …
I fall asleep on the way home and wake up in Preston.
—Pieces of dusty Steelite crockery can sometimes be found, hidden in the shaky towers of unmatched cups, saucers or plates in second hand shops. If you find one it will not be chipped; and if you buy it you can marvel, when you use it, at who in the past may have drunk or eaten from it, and over what long-gone tragedies or jubilations.
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Old crockery #1 here.
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