04.03.2024
Another Brick in the Wall
I can never know what he was thinking...
He stood on the pavement out front looking into the old terraced businesses—once a formal line of mercantile pride—their facades, gone. It might have appeared to him as if a bomb had exploded here in the side street, the sight of it transporting him to another time and place. He looked over it, from the height of the second level to the heaped mass of the structure’s various materials littered within. There were splintered floor boards, wrecked timber trusses hanging under non-existent rooves, shards of glass here and there, a broken chair on its back, a leg folded limp, something of porcelain in pieces. Many bricks lay about higgledy-piggledy, frozen at the point of their final movement, their sand and limestone mortar dusted over all. The thought may have come to him: who was last here? Where are they now? The sight very likely evoked the rubble and remains of an ordinary, instantaneous act of war that came from above: high explosive in upon civilians. He had seen this sight. It was familiar to him. But it was more than twenty years since he’d seen and heard, and smelled, the real thing. For certain, the scene at this place was a sight of destruction, but the only bomb that day in 1967, west of Sydney, was the demolition crew’s saggy old truck, and it was the bricks that were the cause of our having stopped at this spot. It was the bricks that my father had an interest in.
They were hand-made bricks, in a variety of colours, truly identifiable as having come out of the earth. From palest white to creamy yellows and through all the most common hues that can be found in clay: a pallid buff, the stoic grey, flushed fleshy pinks and lively terracotta tones, which could appear almost orange; and the stately shimmer of garnet, deep blue and purple, speckled reddish and brownish by iron oxide, often referred to as impurities. That this produced a characterful result might be a more truthful way of putting it. Bricks, hand-made some time before 1840, many, as I would later learn, by the hands of men transported to Botany Bay—convicts. Formed and fired, the bricks were then laid in courses of oddly disparate personalities, mostly imprisoned behind render, against another building’s wall, by timber panelling, heavy paint, or by a dashed-on white wash. And here they were, these hand-made bricks coming back out of the walls of buildings something more than a hundred years after they were set in there, handled again, by the strong, coarse-fingered meat hooks of the demolition men.
Our stop there that morning may have been interrupted by a thought, perhaps in turning my gaze back towards The Red Cow Hotel, which in those days welcomed its patrons through a broad grassed forecourt. A concrete path cut through this cool turfed area and ran under a covered colonnade to the front door. The open green area was given a vivacious carefree tone by slatted lawn furniture, painted a variety of pastel tints and shaded in late afternoon by a line of trees. It was as near to a classic beer garden as one might find on a jutting piece of land surrounded by bitumen and opposite a railway station. Penrith Railway Station, to be precise. There was a period when our family were Friday evening regulars, with a fish and chips and potato scallops dinner brought in from an Italian seafood place, always accompanied by the same drink order from the bar: a schooner* of beer for my father, a pony of shandy for my mother, and two lemon squash in midi glasses for my sister and me.
Standing by my father as he negotiated for the old bricks, the condition of my own belly’s thirst and hunger would likely have had me wonder when in the heck we might again visit The Red Cow for something yummy and refreshing, and be made to feel special by its impeccably presented publican. The first time I ever saw a name applied in gold, was his: Dal Golds - Registered Licensee, it said, on lacquered dark timber over the entrance. It announced him as the establishment’s main man, thereby forever, for me at least, imbuing that role with a certain esteem and gravitas. Dal had a presence and a smooth style. He offered salutations and asked after the wants of his guests with the warmth practiced—since earliest of times—by all the best in his trade.
Wants and needs…from the beginning.
To my youthful innocence, the bricks, something more than five-thousand of them, seemed like ancient junk. Soon after a hand-shake out on the footpath sealed the deal of these second-hand goods, a few loads of the truck were neatly deposited fifty metres from our house, in a stack alongside the driveway at our ten-acres. In their irregularity, I found the appearance of the bricks unappealing, they still had their fair share of mortar clinging to them. But jumping up onto their assemblage and running upon them made for fun when heading to the chicken coop, or when I felt I needed some altitude at the end of a mile-long walk home from school. They clonked and clunked against each other when walked upon. I don’t have measurements, but the footprint of this wall o’ clunking and clonking bricks may have been a little more than half the length of a cricket pitch, maybe a metre high and near that in width. A monumental addition to our humble place.
The joy that the bricks elicited in my father couldn’t be overstated. I’d imagined that his ‘find’ of them the moment the buildings were being demolished, was amazing luck. The two dots I had failed to connect was that he’d been onto the bricks way sooner than our mere happening upon them that morning. Since he worked as a Guard for the then New South Wales Government Railways - Metropolitan Network, he would have observed the site for days before any work commenced there, and pounced to enquire and make an offer the day he had me in tow. Whatever he paid, it had to have been a relatively modest sum, he was too chuffed at the result for it not to have been so. Besides, the call for ugly old bricks back then would have been rather slim.
As busy as he was in his job and on the property, he embarked on a project to slough off the soft sandy mortar from the bricks, progressively re-stacking them as he went. I began to take a little more interest in them, and watched him as he sat on an old timber stool, heft a brick, spin it in a low toss, grasp it again and present another side, knock and coax the mortar free, scrape, and repeat. A particular feature of the bricks was highlighted by the fact my father was a compulsive player of card games, especially Euchre, which brought uproarious engagement with family and friends around a table, enjoying sausage and beer, smoking cigarettes, slapping the table, a Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass LP playing.
The feature that the vast majority of the bricks exhibited were the four suits that appear on playing cards: diamonds, spades, clubs, and hearts. Out of this came my compulsion to look more closely at them. Through the cleaning, certain bricks were held aside. My father showed them to me. They stood apart from the rest. Yes, each had its diamond, or its spade, its club, or its heart, but these bricks each also had impressed their own unique identifier, their impurity. Beyond the requisite embossment of the card suit, these few bricks had upon them a personal ‘signature’ of the maker. Sometimes his mark was made by scratching an X, single letter, a simple humorous figure of an animal, or ironically, by depressing a thumb or finger upon the clay, leaving behind an impression, a print in fine lines of the individual.
I can never know what my father’s true plan for the bricks was. Not exactly. It would certainly have been about building something, but it wasn’t to be.
We moved elsewhere, and he leased our modest farmhouse property to another family, people he had known a little while. People he had welcomed in.
In the greater irony of that episode, they left their mark by stealing the bricks.
It turned out my father hadn’t known them at all.
And I knew what he was thinking then.
TA
*Even for Australians, who have an intimate relationship with the hops, the various ways the necessarily icy-cold beverage is served in hotels (pubs) across the nation, is notable. Drinking glasses, their beverage volume, and their associated names, differ across the states of this baking hot nation. In New South Wales, where I was born, beer was typically served in the following. A Pint: “Whadda YOU reckon? A Pint, mate!” A Schooner: “Yeah, nah, mate, gissa schooner!” A Midi: “Make it a Midi, mate, the missus is in a hurry.” And a Pony: “A Pony will do me just fine, love. Can you tell me, where’s the Ladies Room?” There’s also the Pot, the Butcher, the Bobby/ie, the Small, a Seven, a Glass, or a Beer. To save time for you and your mates (friends, pals, associates, newly acquainted, or the never yet met), there’s a Jug, or a Handle.
For its devastating anthropological observation of Australian men and the drinking culture of the time, see the 1971 film, 'Wake In Fright'. Director, Ted Kotcheff. Screenwriter, Evan Jones. Based on the novel by Kenneth Cook.