Surrendering to Sorrento

Magical hours with a bittersweet World War I veteran and a stash of lurid novels made holidays special.

Sorrento pier on the Mornington peninsula, a perfect backdrop for idyllic summer escapes. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

"IT'S worse than the end of the world!" That's what my mother said about where we lived when I was five, an outer suburb of Melbourne called Reservoir, which in 1950 was just a couple of half-built, timber-framed weatherboard homes on a muddy track that cracked in summer, with long waving grass on either side.

She still remembers her mother, my Grandma Stanger, saying we were plain mad to leave a nice rented house in Clifton Hill, in the inner city, to live in the middle of nowhere.

My mum, always stoic and determined, would escape Reservoir by taking us all to the beach. Christmas holidays were the best because we spent them at Sorrento on Port Phillip Bay, a long drive away. A seaside village at the narrow southern tip of the boot-shaped Mornington Peninsula, Sorrento was where Grandma Stanger lived and where Mum had grown up, going to the beach every day after school.

On the way there, Dad would tell stories, if we egged him on, or croon a bit. He always fancied himself as something of a Bing Crosby and one of his favourites was White Christmas. While he could be taciturn at the dinner table, when the sense of occasion caught him the stories emerged.

Grandma's house, called Half-Way Cottage, was in St Paul's Road, halfway between the gentle Sorrento Front Beach on Port Phillip Bay and the Back Beach.

Sorrento was a magical, barefoot, short-sleeved place for us. Mum's bedtime stories were about beached stingrays, bleached cuttlefish shells on sandbanks, how you could walk on the rocks when the tide was out, and deep holes where you could drown if you got into difficulties.

One day this almost happened to Mum and her sisters, Joyce and Marjorie. Mum put Joyce on her shoulders and Marjorie, well, she just floated to the end of the pier where she was rescued. I used to think about Auntie Marjorie missing that pier and floating all the way to China.

Loquat trees, hedges of tea-trees and all sorts of nasturtiums, lupins, wallflowers and stocks surrounded Grandma Stanger's house. Bright red tubular blooms fell from the fuchsia tubs and there were mounds of hydrangea bushes topped with large, round flowery balls of pink, white and blue.

There were many birds, and I used to think they shrieked like the rusty brakes of a locomotive.

The house itself was like a doll's house, lined with boards Grandma had painted. Mum said it was hard to get Pop Stanger, her father, to do anything to help. "He wouldn't even sign our school report cards," she told me. "He wasn't one for taking responsibility."

Joseph William Stanger was discharged from the army on May 23, 1919, declared medically unfit. He resented his lot with a bitter passion, yet he clung to life as if determined to make those around him suffer along with him.

Pop Stanger came back from his war with silence on his thin lips. He practised a terseness that war teaches, determined never to revisit the past, and made Grandma's life hell. Occasionally we could persuade him to tell us funny, silly stories about the war and sing songs that were, he said, from the French music halls.

My mother said Dad had tried to put the war out of his mind, but Pop's trenches were always going to be full of water. Pop Stanger was in the second wave at Gallipoli, then spent time in the foul potholes of Ypres and was gassed, Mum explained.

He told everyone he was a meningitis carrier and never picked us up for a cuddle because he was afraid he might give it to us.

He was a tough old case, but his eyes would sparkle if you asked him to do tricks. He made pennies walk across his fingers. He could make them disappear and would find them behind our ears. He could even make a cigarette vanish inside his mouth.

My younger brother Dennis once asked him why he didn't do that the night he was drunk and set his bedroom on fire with a cigarette. He laughed and laughed. When it came to milking a joke, Pop Stanger knew how to lick the plate clean.

He knocked about the township doing odd jobs and selling fish to the pubs. Sometimes he let me go with him in his old truck.

We always stopped for a drink at the sandstone Sorrento Hotel, a lemon squash for me, and several brandies and milk for him. He was a laugh a minute with everyone in the bar, beret perched on his head at an unlikely angle, his eyes twinkling, drinking for boldness, charm and wit. Pop was a character, the locals said.

At home with my grandmother, the laughter was often bitter, mocking and violent.

In the late afternoon, he disappeared into his book-strewn bedroom. "Need to get the sun-dazzle out of me eyes, boys," he would say. I never saw love between him and my grandmother but sometimes her eyes would lose their patina of perseverance and pain, shame and embarrassment, and scorn. He was a street angel and a devil at home, Grandma said after he died. There had been a time when she loved him.

There were bullet holes in the roof of his bedroom, really a sleep-out attached to the small house. He kept a rifle in the corner of the untidy room, which he used for shooting rabbits. Sometimes he took pot shots at the ceiling. My brother once said maybe that's where the Turks and Germans had gone to hide.

Pop's favourite place in his garden was a shed filled with engine parts, bits of guns, rusting fishing tackle, and all sorts of machinery being saved for some unimaginable purpose.

Old Pop Stanger loved the Back Beach, beyond which, he would say, you don't want to go. Some nights he and my dad would disappear, wrapped in jumpers and oilskins bound for that wild beach.

Hours later, they'd return with buckets of crayfish and tip them out on to the floor of the back veranda. Grabbing a cavalryman's sabre, Pop would chase those scurrying crays as if the Last Charge had just been sounded.

We caught flathead with handlines from his dinghy, which he kept moored at the Sorrento pier on the Front Beach, drifting the shallow waters, sometimes going as far as Carrum. "Keep your bait on the move," Pop would growl. "Jig it up and down."

I loved the way Pop could read the water: the broken surface, the lifting sand, the swirling currents, the drifting food and trailing seaweed. He could look through those breakers and see fish.

"There are those days, son," he'd say, "when a fish would take a bait tied to a mooring rope." There were other days when we would catch nothing.

Pop would curse when, from nowhere, an offshore wind would couple with an ebbing tide and we would be late for tea. Grandma would be angry and Pop would press his fingers against the skin of his forehead as if gently inspecting it for damage.

Every holiday at Sorrento he shared his books with me: bundles of paperbacks with busty, sloe-eyed women falling out of their camisoles on the covers. There were irresistible blurbs on the backs: "Will make your blood run cold"; "The hot-headed daughter of the first deputy police commissioner"; "Seductive picture of a city that makes Hogarth's London look like Cincinnati on the afternoon of the fourth of July."

I loved especially the small, brightly coloured Carter Browns ("the slick storytelling sensation who's sold 10 million copies"), which Pop said were his favourites.

Pop Stanger got his adventure, mystery and romance from bleary nights filled with paperback promises of gin, sin and floozies and so would I. But in among the Carter Browns and Zane Greys could be found the odd John O'Hara, John Steinbeck and even John Dos Passos, part of a job lot swapped for a crate of crayfish and a couple of pounds of flathead at the quarantine station at Portsea.

Holidays at Sorrento offered tranquillity as I sank into those books. I wanted the powers those fictional characters possessed. I wanted to be the man who left no sign, a ghost rider who could smell the presence of the enemy, a quick and silent throat slitter who faded to invisibility after the kill.

By 1960, at the age of 15, I had read Chandler and most of Hammett; I looked for other places to discover myself, anything to get away. I loved the spy books of Britons John Buchan, Geoffrey Household, Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, borrowed from Reservoir's public library in Edwards Street. It was near the railway station and the new Woolworths store where girls worked when they left school, suddenly grown up and wearing bright lipstick and sly smiles.

In the early 1960s, you were supposed to grow up like your mum and dad, work the same machines and mend those same socks. But in the summer of 1959, when Pop Stanger started to load me up with boxes of books, the future started to change for me.

Somehow, I think I understood that Pop Stanger, with his bloodcurdling cries, hacking cough, wartime misadventures, second-hand vaudeville tricks and lurid paperbacks, had, in a sense, invented himself.

The old bastard got through to me and taught me something about resourcefulness and never surrendering the idea of who you were, the way you saw yourself.

I thought freedom was all about breaking away, but it would take a long time. As Mum said, "You can never get away, Graeme you only find yourself somewhere else."