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author
Geoffrey Gibson
If you will step inside my mind briefly, I will try to explain my world for you. I am once again a boy again in the years of the Second World War and living with my mother and an older brother and ...view moreIf you will step inside my mind briefly, I will try to explain my world for you. I am once again a boy again in the years of the Second World War and living with my mother and an older brother and sister. We live in a flat on the shore of Sydney Harbor in Double Bay, where my mother success-fully runs a suburban grocery shop while my father is overseas fighting Hitler and someone called the "Nips". What concerns me is that my friend Dicky is a much better swimmer than I am, and that I love a little girl named Carroll in my class. The only time I wear shoes is when I go to school.
An anti-submarine boom is stretched across the harbor, and when a Japanese sub randomly lobs shells at Sydney, we shelter under the kitchen table. Large British and American warships glide in and out, and for the first time I taste tomato soup onboard a huge British battleship. Our introductions to Coca Cola and sticks of gum comes later. With apologies, "the Yanks", and we never call them anything else, maroon their little timber motorboats they hire to take their girls out for a day on the harbor, on the mud bank in front of our place. Then they tip us with Coke and sticks of gum when we wade out and push them off. The Yanks, their Coke, sticks of gum and Hopalong Cassidy are our heroes.
Those years are not so long ago in my mind. There were no super-markets or television, and our King and Queen lived far away in London, and in our hour of peril, for the first time since settlement we loosened the apron strings. It is high time we untied them com-pletely.
So what have we lost?
I think we have lost a lot more than we realize, certainly the ability to converse with each other and to amuse ourselves. For me, apart from sport and the news, most of what passes for television is bilge. Is it too unkind to say we are losing our sense of humor? If we are, I blame it on TV prompts like canned laughter, you have seen and heard them yourself, hysterical laughter blaring from the set, over a dialogue that is not even remotely funny. For I remember the cut and thrust of lively and amusing dinner time conversation. Even more Orwellian, I feel we are in danger of having what we see and hear slanted and controlled by an unseen, unelected and uncontrol-lable power.
What have we gained?
The greatest gift of all, a close friend. I refer of course to our genuine and enduring affection for America.
I feel it is a great privilege to still be hale and healthy, and I have written these stories, particularly "The Taciturn Man", as a tribute to the father I barely knew when I was a boy. The rest of this collection are reminiscences, and have been written to entertain the reader. I hope they do.view less