It's something about dress-ups:
a discussion of uniformity with
a bloke who knew all about it
by PHILIP WHITE
Like a rather hungry rottweiler-mastiff-ridgeback cross I
once lived with, I've never taken much of a shine to people in uniform.
Something about dress-ups; something about folks who need to look alike;
something about the notion that if you design a uniform, be it spiritual,
martial or whatever, some pretender will very quickly swell to fill it.
I was always nervous about the Salvos, who
appear to have had a bad few weeks in the bullying/paedo/murder allegation
stakes.
Poor buggers are discovering message drift.
Poor buggers are discovering message drift.
Their uniform is obviously martial masquerading as spiritual, or vice-versa.
Whichever way, it's a dangerous combination which to
me seems to leave a large inviting door open to people who to me would
seem to be pretty much my opposite.
Which is not to deny that in the golden overcrowded
smoking years of The Exeter, I always made a donation to old Norma the Salvo
when she'd do the Friday night rounds of the East End, perfectly uniformed, rattling
her donation bag up and down the street from one bar to another, her crusty old
civvy-clad cloth-capped knuckleboxing husband always hovering in her wake, just
to keep an eye on the money. He carried a very heavy walking stick.
Norma's bags would get so heavy they'd leave them behind
the bar at The Ex while they cleaned up the other pubs and bars in the street. I carried one
once to their car. It was a lot of money.
One morning when publican Nicholas Binns was on holiday,
I shared the front bar with a bloke who'd obviously done a runner from the
hospital for a quiet spell with a smoke and a beer. That was commonplace
behaviour for many patients. He was down the billiard table end of the bar in a
hospital robe with his head bandaged like a mummy. Looked bad. I was up the
front, at what was then the dart board end. The elder Binns, Spencer, was
covering for his absent brother behind the jump. There was nobody else there.
Spencer poured me my breakfast stout.
"See that bloke down there?" he asked in a
stage whisper. "Who do you reckon that is?"
"I dunno. Rameses II?"
"Nah", he said, leaning forward, polishing a
glass."That's the most wanted man in Australia. That's Jimmy Coleraine."
I'd barely had a chance to ask how Spencer could
recognise the most wanted man in Australia dressed as a mummy when the bloke
under discussion came determinedly up the length of the bar, pulled up a stool
and sat in next to me.
"Hullo," the mummy said, putting his hand
forward. "I'm Jimmy Coleraine. How the hell could you tell who I am?"
I said I had no idea who he was. Spencer went down the
other end and polished glasses.
Jimmy, a cat burglar and master escapee, was famous for
escaping from everywhere. His championship was somehow evaporating from the horrid maximum security division at Pentridge Prison, now long
since shut for humanitarian reasons. He did that H-Block jump again. Jimmy could slither out of anywhere. He had the screws jinxed: it seemed he
could pass through a locked door like a spook.
We talked that morning about
uniforms, and the types who tended to inhabit them. Salvos, priests, coppers
and screws. Et cetera.
Turned out in that his years on the streets and in
prisons, Jimmy'd been bashed so much by so many that his face - he pulled some
of the bandages to the side to show me - had become such a cobweb of scars it looked
like a lace doily. It was time to do something about it.
He'd read in the newspapers in Pentridge
about the excellent work of the Royal Adelaide Hospital plastic surgery team
led by David David, and had checked out and made his way across the border to
have his face sorted. Once he'd scored his initial appointment, the doc took
one look at his face and became transfixed on one of Jimmy's cheeks. In the
midst of all that scarring he'd spotted a melanoma. So instead of smoothing the countenance of my
charming drinking companion, they'd scooped out half the poor bastard's cheek.
Not happy.
That week I gave Jimmy my Salvo donation many times over once
his mysterious government stipend had siphoned itself into Spencer's till. In return, he gave me the first chapter of his autobiography, which I
still have.
Spicy.
Spicy.
Jimmy taught me a lot about dealing with people in
uniform. Obviously a bloke with such a miserable income combined with his wantedness
and need for lots of smokes and drinks would find it a bit tricky to stay in
the Hilton. So he stayed round in Whitmore Square, with the homeless drunks and the Salvos.
He'd be locked in there for a week in their drunk tank, fed and watered, until the day his mysterious cheque came in, when he'd bring it round to The Ex and drink it all in one hearty session, then wander back and surrender again to the uniformed folks to clean himself out. He patiently performed this ritual until his face was vaguely presentable and all the dressings came off.
He'd be locked in there for a week in their drunk tank, fed and watered, until the day his mysterious cheque came in, when he'd bring it round to The Ex and drink it all in one hearty session, then wander back and surrender again to the uniformed folks to clean himself out. He patiently performed this ritual until his face was vaguely presentable and all the dressings came off.
Before Jimmy'd finished his next week in the safe arms of the Salvos, there was a Grand Prix ball, when all the ladies of
Springfield got their diamonds out of their safe deposit boxes, wore them to the Hyatt and went
home to collapse dribbling fizz with the ice left on their bedside tables. Somebody
went through the bedrooms of Springfield that night and cleaned out mansion
after mansion, tip-toing around the slumbering drunk rich.
I never saw Jimmy again. But I got back at the uniformed
Salvo bully who went inexcusably nuts when I once smuggled Jimmy in a can of VB
and a packet of Escorts.
I conducted a huge champagne tasting for Christmas
publication, I think in The National
Times. Between pours, my stewards anxiously eyed the
great stack of expensive bottles building up in the cool room. Hundreds of 'em.
I'd bought a shipment of stopper corks, so once I'd sampled my glass
from each bottle and made my evaluation, and the stewards had had a sip, the
stopper went in and the bottle went back in the fridge.
At the end of day two, Howard Twelftree (writer) and Timothy
John (painter), who made perfectly good stewards without uniform, helped me stack
all the cartons on the back of Tim's truck. We drove into Whitmore Square,
straight across the lawn to a large circle of recreational drinkers, sitting
there around a flagon beneath a Moreton Bay fig. They eyed us suspiciously,
thinking we looked like trouble from the Council or somewhere.
We pulled up. I wound the window down.
"You blokes drink champagne?" I asked.
Cynical grumbling. Nobody looked up.
"Do you blokes drink champagne?"
Eventually one barked "Of course we drink fucking
champagne."
"Good," I said, climbing down.
It took us a few minutes to unload that truck. Without a
word, we stacked those dozens up on the lawn. Bollinger, Cristal, Mumm, Dom,
Heidsieck, Lanson, Möet, Krug, Billecart-Salmon, Laurent-Perrier, Gosset,
Gratien, Pol, Veuve, Pommery ... brut, pink, demi-sec ... every exotic,
expensive fizz imported into the country came off the back of that truck.
Nobody moved. Then we climbed back aboard and drove away into the traffic.
My last viewing of those gentlemen saw them standing in a
ring around that mountain of Christmas fizz, just gazing at it.
I reckon the hardarse Whitmore Square Salvo learned a bit about champagne that
night.
Serves 'em right. Jimmy woulda loved it.
Serves 'em right. Jimmy woulda loved it.
Bloody uniforms.
