The Summer of ’82 Read online

  We decided to head to Drago’s place. This was what we generally did – we just wandered from house to house, picking up another mate as we went. No one wanted to stay at his own house, though, so we would be constantly on the move. And as this was 1982, there were a lot of mums at home, and no one wanted to hang out in his rumpus room when his mum was nearby.

  Drago was probably my second-best friend. If I was the ideas man of the organisation and Noddy was the muscle, Drago was the brains. He was an anomaly at Mitcham High as he was a ‘triple threat’. He could play footy like Warwick Capper (come on, he was good once), he knew more than quiz show host Tony Barber, and he charmed the ladies like Greg Evans from Perfect Match.

  You’d think with these skills Drago would be hanging out with the jocks or the smart kids, but he liked hanging out with us. I don’t know what you’d call us – we were kind of nerds, but some of us liked sport and we all loved rock music. I think what defined us was that we were a bit naughty; the pot plant kidnapping was just the tip of the iceberg. And Drago loved that stuff.

  We briefly went into Drago’s rumpus room but his mum soon turned up so we went out the front and sat on our bikes.

  ‘So what are we going to do?’ Noddy asked.

  ‘We could go to Fiona’s house,’ I suggested.

  ‘I’ve already been,’ said Noddy. ‘She’s on a tour of a university.’

  ‘Jesus, she’s confident.’

  ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea,’ Drago said, leaning in and lowering his voice. ‘Do you want to make some bombs?’

  We all looked at each other.

  ‘I know how,’ he went on.

  ‘Relax, Drago,’ I said. ‘You had us at “bombs”.’

  CHERRY BOMB

  I shudder to think what would happen these days if a bunch of kids decided to make a bomb for fun. They would be put on a watch list or sent to Guantanamo. They’d be called a terrorist threat when in fact, if they were anything like me and my mates, they were just bored teenagers who couldn’t meet any girls.

  How did Drago know how to make bombs before the internet was invented? Like Mondo Rock, it wasn’t the kind of thing the library had books on. Well, we knew a guy called Brian, who used to talk to us every night at six p.m. Yes, Brian told us how to make bombs … Brian told us so. I’m talking of Brian Naylor, the presenter of National Nine News. He even had his own jingle: ‘Brian told me, Brian told me so. I know everything I need to know because Brian told me so.’

  And Brian wasn’t just a Victorian thing – New South Wales had their own Brian, the legendary Brian Henderson. And guess what – they used the same jingle for him! The ultimate cost-cutting measure by Channel 9.

  Every night we ate tea at six o’clock, and Brian would be in the lounge room telling us stuff. We would eat in the dining room, and Dad’s seat was the only one facing the telly. Yeah, smart man. So he watched and we listened. We could hear Brian but we couldn’t see him.

  Mum would try to start a conversation. ‘So what was school like today? Are there any nice girls in your class?’ Dad would just sit there with one eye on the telly and one eye on us. He was convinced none of his sons could eat ‘properly’. ‘Look at ’em, Joyce,’ he’d say. ‘They can’t eat properly!’ Then he’d turn to the telly. ‘Bloody hell, Pat Cash won Wimbledon!’

  Occasionally Dad would be like Darryl Kerrigan in The Castle. ‘These chops are beautiful, Joyce. I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight!’ Except he would be more angry than funny. Like a lot of 1970s dads, he had fought in a war, worked in a tough job and just wanted a quiet family life. (Good luck with four teenage boys, Kev.) And he did love Mum’s cooking. In fact, the story went that the first time he went home to meet Mum’s parents, he was hooked by Nanna’s cooking.

  The other story was that Mum’s dad, Herbert, didn’t want to let Kev in the house because he was in uniform. Herb was a wharfie and detested authority of any type, even a young bloke from the RAAF. I’m not saying wharfies are dodgy, but every time we went to Nanna and Grandad’s, Herb would pull me aside and show me his work bag, which was always chock-full of hot stuff. ‘You want some whiskey? Cigarettes? Ladies stockings?’

  ‘Grandad, I’m ten!’ I’d reply. ‘So just the stockings, thanks.’

  Dad’s one rule about cooking was: no chicken. You see, Dad had served in the Vietnam War and eaten chicken every single day on his air force base. And it was bad chicken. When he came back, he just said, ‘No chicken, Joyce.’

  When Mark was sixteen he got a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken just to defy Dad. (Back then, it wasn’t known as KFC – Colonel Sanders wasn’t scared of the ‘F word’. In fact he was proud that his product was deep-fried.) Every Friday night Mark would get home at about eleven p.m. and stand in the doorway of our bedroom with a bucket of the Colonel’s finest under his arm. Glenn and I would look up to see the crazed face of an adolescent who had consumed too much Pepsi, MSG, grease, fat and those famous herbs and spices.

  ‘Do you babies want some chicken?’ Mark would ask.

  ‘Yes! Yes!’

  ‘Then beg for it.’

  ‘Please, please, give us some chicken, Mark!’ By now we were sitting up like meerkats.

  And then he would throw the chicken at us. We would catch it – well, most of the time – and eat it under our doonas. And if you’d never really had chicken before, can you imagine the taste of cold KFC? It was heaven on a stick … okay, a drumstick.

  We’d be making plenty of noise, and Dad hated being woken up, so pretty soon he would come running into our room, swinging his belt around. This was made even more disturbing by the fact he slept in a singlet only. So he’d be trying to cover up his giblets while swinging this leather belt around his head like a helicopter. ‘You kids aren’t eating bloody chicken in my house!’ he would yell as he gave us the strap, while we’d be trying to hide under our doonas and save our precious chicken. Not a disturbing memory at all … I see a psychiatrist once a week, so it sometimes comes up.

  So we were eating dinner and it was definitely not chicken. We were engrossed in some conversation like which was the best band (KISS or ABBA), the best iceblock (Glug or Razz), the best car (Ford or Holden), the best smorgasbord restaurant (Denny’s or The Keg). But all talk ceased when we heard Brian say, ‘Two boys were arrested today in suburban Melbourne for making homemade bombs …’ You could have heard a pin drop as Brian continued: ‘They made the explosive devices using household objects – a combination of common brake fluid and pool chlorine …’

  I put down my knife and fork. ‘Can I be excused from the table, please?’

  Drago had seen the same news story and had bomb fever too, so his suggestion that we make our own bomb was enthusiastically embraced. We rode our bikes back to Dad’s shed and requisitioned what we needed.

  We wanted this bomb to be really good. The explosion relied on the chemical reaction that would take place when the brake fluid came into contact with the chlorine, so we had to work out a way to keep them apart until the very last minute. First we put the brake fluid into a test tube and sealed it up. Then we filled an old oil container with the chlorine, and put the sealed test tube into it. The idea was that we’d throw the container, the test tube would smash and whammo! Our science teacher would have been so proud – and then probably horrified.

  This all sounds so dangerous now, but my generation grew up with explosives. Doesn’t anyone remember Cracker Night, also known as Guy Fawkes Night? Try explaining that to a child of today …

  Child: ‘So you bought the fireworks illegally somehow?’

  Dad: ‘No, we got them at the milk bar.’

  Child: ‘And you let them off when no one was around?’

  Dad: ‘No, the whole community got together in a paddock.’

  Child: ‘And then you let the fireworks off?’

  Dad: ‘No, we lit a bonfire first, then the children would be pushed to the front of the crowd, and then we’d let the crackers off!’

 
Child: ‘What about the fire brigade?’

  Dad: ‘They loved it – they lit the fire.’

  So we made this very large and special bomb. We thought of it as marking the end of our school lives – and the beginning of our freedom! It would be our very own fireworks display. We walked down to the paddock, carrying our special package with extra care. Hey, we were stupid but not dumb. We climbed over the fence and made our way down the paddock, away from the houses.

  ‘Okay,’ said Drago, handing over the bomb. ‘You throw it, Noddy.’

  Noddy looked pissed off. ‘Why do I have to throw it? I’m always doing the crap jobs.’

  Oh no – the muscle of the gang was arcing up.

  ‘You throw it, Dave,’ Noddy said.

  ‘No, I supplied the stuff. You throw it, Drago.’

  ‘No way,’ he snorted. ‘I’m going to be a surgeon one day – I need my fingers.’

  It was a stalemate. We had our bomb but all of us lacked guts. Then our prayers were answered.

  ‘What are youse guys doin’?’ said a small voice.

  We looked around; it was Phil Kent sticking his head over the fence. His house backed on to the paddock. Now, Phil was younger than us and keen to make a good impression. So, like all good terrorist organisations, we recruited a young and vulnerable person to do our dirty work for us.

  Phil was from a very large family who lived in a big, ramshackle house – so he might not even be missed if the bomb went bad. I considered my family working-class, but when you went to Phil’s house they out-working-classed us. Their dad worked in a factory and would come home every night with six longnecks under his arm, and drink all of them. They had ferrets in their backyard, with a pipe system so they could ‘run free’. One time they even let us build a BMX track down the back of their yard. When we asked Dad why we couldn’t build one in our yard, he said, ‘That’s the difference between owning your house and renting it. The Kents don’t give a stuff about that joint.’

  Phil was very keen to throw our device and was over the fence quicker than one of his ferrets. He lobbed the bomb twenty or thirty metres away, and it bounced on the ground and came to a halt. It sat there for a few seconds as we let out a disappointed ‘aww’. We all took a step closer, then bang! It went off and bits flew everywhere, and a rain of dirt showered over us. It was the loudest explosion we had ever heard. Dogs started barking and we ran and hid in the bushes in Phil’s backyard.

  We watched as people came running out of their houses and started talking about what had just happened. We heard one old lady say, ‘It shook the foundations of my chook shed!’ Her chickens were going to lay omelettes, we laughed. It was all so hilarious – and then the cops turned up.

  Back in those days they didn’t bother with the siren and lights. A car just screeched to a halt and we heard two doors opening and thumping shut. That was when we knew it was the cops. This was Drago’s cue to flee the area, but the rest of us stayed and kept watch from the bushes. We saw two policemen walking into the paddock, towards the bomb site. And we knew one of them – it was Constable Darren Dewey. He was young himself – only about five years older than us. Not only had he attended our high school, he had been in our Scout troop. And Dad had been his Scout leader.

  Yes, Kev O’Neil loved a uniform. He had been a Scout leader for a long time. He had even started a Cub Scout troop in Vietnam; I bet that’s exactly what young kids want to do when there’s a war on, run around the jungle in khaki uniforms. So Dad was in the air force, the Scouts and more recently the Freemasons. As Mum once said, ‘Your father just loves wearing funny clothes and hanging out with men.’ We never dared let him see the Village People.

  The situation was now turning into an episode of Homicide. Constable Darren Dewey picked up the shredded container that had been our bomb. He looked at it, then looked around at the nearby houses. He clocked the O’Neil house up the road and nodded his head, no doubt remembering the teenage boys who lived there. Constable Dewey had worked it out: this case had O’Neil written all over it. But he had no real evidence.

  Then Dad arrived home early from work. He pulled up in his station wagon and noticed the divvy van parked in the normally quiet street. As he got out, Constable Dewey approached. For a second Dad was happy to see his former Scout, who had embraced the power of the uniform and moved up from a green one to a nice blue one. ‘Darren, good to see you, son—’

  Darren cut him off. ‘I’m afraid, Akela – I mean, Kevin – this is not a social visit.’

  Dad’s face fell. He probably thought the worst, but then spied the shredded container in the policeman’s hand.

  ‘Kevin O’Neil,’ Constable Dewey said in a very formal manner. ‘Do you recognise THIS container?’

  Behind the bushes, we were praying hard: ‘Dad, no, no – don’t say anything. Shtum, Dad – don’t grass on us!’

  ‘Yep,’ said Dad in an injured tone. ‘That’s from my garage.’

  No! Dobbed in by my own dad.

  Constable Dewey paused for effect. ‘Where are the boys, Kevin? And why are you taking off your belt?’

  GET A JOB

  It took me ages to get the guts to go home. I knew the game was up. I was a student of British TV cop shows like The Sweeney and The Professionals and I knew our old man had sold us down the river to the Guv’nor. Or, in Scouting terms, he had dyb dyb dybed and dob dob dobbed. Okay, he hadn’t meant to, but I knew one thing for sure: he’d be very angry. I hung around the Kents’ house until I saw Dad’s station wagon leaving our place. He had Scouts at seven-thirty, and nothing was going to stop him from putting on a uniform and hanging out with men (or in this case, little men).

  I walked in the back door and Glenn looked up from his Smash Hits magazine, where he was studying Limahl’s hairstyle. ‘Boy, are you in trouble,’ he said. ‘Dad was really angry. For a minute he even thought I was involved. I may not be a twin for much longer.’

  Yeah, no one ever thought you would be involved, I thought. Making bombs ain’t going to bring world peace or stop hunger.

  Mark came bounding out of the toilet, almost too eager to contribute. ‘Mum said it was really loud! What did you do this time that made it different from the last?’

  At least Mark appreciated the bomb-making skills involved. He was a technically minded guy. If anyone should have been making bombs in the family it was Mark. Or maybe Dad. Finally I had made something with my hands that worked – he should have been proud.

  ‘Dad thought it was me,’ Mark said, ‘but I was at work so I had my alibi sorted. You’re going to get a whipping when he comes home.’

  ‘What should I do?’ I asked. Mark was a seasoned trouble-maker.

  ‘Lie, cry, deny,’ he answered very quickly.

  ‘But Dad knows it was me.’

  ‘Okay – just cry, then.’

  I walked into the kitchen, where Mum was doing the dishes. ‘Hi, Mum.’

  She didn’t turn around, so I knew she was angry. ‘Your tea is in the oven.’

  I didn’t say anything else and got my dinner out. It was my favourite, kai si ming. Like an Aussie version of chow mein – mince meat, curry powder and chicken noodle soup mix. You ate it and you were practically in Beijing.

  Mum sat down and then exploded. ‘What were you thinking? Your father is so angry. And here’s him thinking Darren Dewey was dropping over to say hello, and suddenly he’s dragged into a criminal investigation!’

  ‘Mum, it was Drago’s idea—’

  ‘I don’t care who else was involved. We know you used Dad’s stuff to make the bomb. You could have been killed.’

  ‘Mum, I didn’t throw it. Phil Kent did.’ I was on a dobbing roll.

  ‘Oh, well, that’s just fabulous – you put a young boy at risk too. One day after finishing school and you’re already misbehaving. You just wait till your father gets home.’

  That sounded like a cliché but it was true. This was how it always went. Mum built up a dossier on you, then Dad arrived
home, got the briefing and dished out the punishment. The enforcer would go to work.

  I went to bed feeling sick, and pretended to be asleep. Glenn lay on his bed and sang that song by the bloke from Fleetwood Mac that went, ‘I think I’m in trouble …’ Stuff Fleetwood Mac – I always hated them, except for ‘Tusk’, which you had to admire for those drums at the start. To drown Glenn out, I started playing the ‘Tusk’ drums on my stomach and singing along.

  Our Fleetwood Mac jam ended abruptly when I saw the headlights of the station wagon shine through our window. After coming in through the garage, Dad strode straight to our bedroom and turned on the light. I didn’t look up. I knew Glenn had hidden under his doona too, and he wasn’t even in trouble.

  ‘Tomorrow you and me are going up to the police station, and you are going to explain yourself to the bomb squad,’ Dad said in a rapid-fire voice. ‘And then you’re getting a job.’ He turned the light off but I knew there was more to come. Then the light turned on again. ‘And we’ll be bringing those other wankers who helped you out.’

  He turned the light off again and I could hear Glenn sniggering under the doona. Dad did use the word wanker a lot, and we were pretty sure he didn’t know its real meaning. I think he originally said whacker – as in ‘He’s a bit of a bushwhacker’ – but then the 1980s hit and he started calling our friends ‘a bunch of wankers’. Probably that was factually correct for a group of sixteen-year-old boys but perhaps a little inappropriate. Still, he would stand at the back door and say in a loud voice, ‘It’s family day today, Noddy, so go home, you wanker.’