Me and Margaret

NO BULLSHIT
Margaret Holloway was my first real, no bullshit, conjugal girlfriend. Although only vaguely aware of each other, fifty minutes after hooking up at Dutch’s twenty first birthday party we had consummated our relationship in the back seat of someone’s car. A consummation achieved at miraculous speed courtesy of an unremarkable fashion item of the mid sixties known as the mu-mu a single smock like garment that was as easily off as on. Now I know that this may sound tawdry even sluttish but I like to think that though my behaviour may have been so and typical of ancestors dating back to Neolithic times, Margaret’s behaviour was very much that of a modern, enlightened, no bullshit, pre-feminist, feminist girl demanding her right to equality of sex in the swinging sixties.

Margaret at sixteen (or almost) would thereafter obstinately claim that at this meeting she was a virgin and that I was her first, a claim which though I would never have protested, I could never quite bring myself to believe. Such is the nature of men and women or at the very least this man who at twenty one years of age was certainly a virgin and certainly not protesting it.

Extremely well developed and in complicity with her mother, on the pill, she was as well prepared as any. I was positively agape at my underserved good fortune. For a month, maybe more thereafter, she took my calls but resisted my entreaties, no doubt holding out for a proper date to a movie or dance rather than as she correctly perceived an invitation to copulate in the back of my ute. Eventually time played its part as it so often does. She left school, commenced an arts degree at uni and found coming each day to my generous share house room in Bondi on her newly acquired Honda step through, preferable to lectures and tutorials. Here, in Wellington Street, Bondi, where a group of us rented the Methodist Manse next to the Methodists church and across the street from the Catholic church and school, we wiled away many a wonderful day without recourse to movies, dances or churches.

Needless to say these activities that often kept Margaret out late, studying as far as her parents were concerned, did not lead to the academic results they expected. Never mind she’d try harder next year when like most youth of the day she moved out of home to a share flat in Paddington with her lifelong school friend, Julie and Nanette her cousin. Now it became unnecessary to ever leave Bondi except to pay rent and appear for family parades at Paddington where Julie and Nanette had to nervously maintain an extra single dishevelled bed in case of surprise parental visits.

About this time David (Elphic) who was managing the Sydney office of the Melbourne rock mag Go Set, bought a terrace house in Riley Street, East Sydney and a splinter group of the Bondi crowd, David, Rob Campbell and Yours truly moved in. Exciting times as we began to live a Sydney version of the swinging Sixties aided in major part by Go Set’s access to all the new pop/rock albums ahead of local release. Up and coming stars were visitors including Ross Wilson yet to become Daddy Cool, but my favourite was Karl Wellander, second principal dancer with the Australian Ballet who with his fantastic libido hosted affairs in the upstairs bedroom with the two female principles on a daily basis until the arrival of his wife from Melbourne.

One night Phillip Fraser, one of the three directors of Go Set, along with his advertising manager, a dynamo who’s name I cant recollect, flew up from Melbourne for a curry which they led us to believe was not available in Melbourne (haven’t times changed). Invited to join them for my very first curry, by mid meal I thought I had died and was suffering the much deserved torments of hell. As I recall the restaurant was mostly underground with very small high windows and deep red flock wallpaper which easily produced hallucinatory flames.

Sometime during this period Margaret’s “supposed” housemates moved to a large share house delightfully located across the street from Centennial Park on Darley Road, Randwick. Here Margaret had her official address and after some time she and I began to co-habitat there. In this large house we shared with Julie who was by now partnered with Duch, her cousins Nanette, her cousin Graham Moore, well on his way to becoming an acid causality (nailed close the front door to turn the hall into rentable space), and their friend Kylie a dazzlingly confident young spunk in anyone’s language, and sometimes her drummer boyfriend Gary or Pancho (because of his lush moustache). I recall an odd sort of waste space at the back, a communal entertainment zone where we had a stereo of my own invention consisting of a stereo turntable wired through two old radio amplifiers to speakers mounted in cardboard beer boxes. Someone, Pancho I think had a bi-polar Doberman whose paranoia would cause him to loose it from time to time and savage someone from the two legged race. We’d be sitting on the floor (no chairs) in the “music” room passing a joint, getting high, a little bit sensitive when in would walk Dobie (not his real name and it’s a credit to the power of drugs that I’ve forgotten what that was) who would stop and stand just too still. His skin would tremble as only that of Dobermans and race horses can. Welcome to music room roulette, we knew that one of us was for it and felt no comfort from being stoned and tongue tied, silent in fact and still till Dobie made his choice. I recall incredulity that this situation could arise not once but over and over and that our small community seemed powerless to adjudicate it.

I should here introduce Margaret’s parents who’s names if I ever did know them I have long since forgotten Lets just call them Mr. and Mrs. Holloway a bit like Mr and Mrs. Robinson really though Mrs. never attempted to seduce me. Robust upstanding burgers of Strathfield with a handsome nuclear family, Mr. was some type of executive and Mrs. Worked part time for a men’s draper where I’m certain she would have taken a good inside leg measure and found great humour in asking sir which side he favoured. I was a good distance away from their choice of partner for a trophy daughter and was not often invited to share with them at the family heath. The first invite came the evening of the day that Margaret and I were woken early, well nine thirty-ish, by Julie with the news that Margaret’s parents had come to visit. Lacking the classic wardrobe I fled via the front window to spend some time dressing and communing with the ducks in the park, beginning to wonder what Mr and Mrs might make of the abundance of men’s clothing and whether someone had thought to hide the bag of grass. Mercifully soon, Margaret appeared with the news that we were busted and they wanted to parley, the gist of which for these poor uptight folk who could not afford a scene even here in front of an easily cowered bunch of juveniles, was that Margaret and I should attend for dinner that night at Strathfield when all would be sorted.

That was to be the night of my best, possibly my only ever clever negotiation. As I had a cab shift that night we thought it would be better to forego some earnings and use the cab as transport rather than my motor bike which might create a bad impression. We also saw that it would provide a good excuse for an early departure. After a pleasant enough reception and meal the deal was presented, the classic choose from the following two options, I don’t remember exact details but both heavily weighted in favour of Mr and Mrs with Margaret staying at home and me buggering off. Faced with this decision I asked for a time out so that Margaret and I could discuss privately the options and this seemed to please them. This was going OK, maybe they had misjudged this sensible boy, time out granted. In the privacy of Margaret’s bedroom I resisted the adolescent urge for a quickie in her childhood bed and instead suggested that the scope of choice was too limited, why should there only be two options, and shouldn’t we have some input to the option making process as surely we were equal if not more than equal in the makeup of this dispute. Margaret liked this line of thinking and we began creating other options with a nice balance in favour of our desires. With Margaret steadfast behind me we re-entered the fray and presented our favoured option explaining that we had already voted in favour of it and that the best result if they did not agree was a deadlock in which it would be incumbent on both parties to retreat to default until a new meeting could be convened at a mutually convenient time in the future or words to that effect. Well it was obvious to me that this well reasoned argument was loosing me any respect I might have previously gained and luckily we had prepared for this eventuality with a hasty retreat plan. Just as well for as we headed up the hall I felt the breeze of Mr’s misguided kick as he almost broke from the bonds of his stifled established mores.

Margaret and I were never more troubled by her parents and though memories are slim I think we were even asked to dinner a few times thereafter. Sometime later when Margaret and I mutually split the biggest problem was, as it always is, how to arrange the logistics. It was obviously my move as ruling clique at Darley Road were all girl friends of Margaret’s so I went to my mate Wayne’s place at Paddington. It’s tempting to take credit, gloat even that I was the instrument that freed this beauty from the constraints of stifling suburbia. But I’m sure Margaret would have achieved this end alone or in some other company anyway. At least I hope so or else maybe I also share the credit for the implosion that was coming to take over this family.

For most of our time together, maybe two years, I made my living as a taxi driver. Margaret who started as a student with parental support soon dropped out to waitressing at Whisky Au-Go-Go where the Vietnam War served up American boys with five day R-n-R’s and five hundred to a thousand dollars in their pockets for the Sydney “entertainment” industry to devour. All the girls worked at Whisky and all the boys drove cabs. It wasn’t uncommon to pick up your girl at the end of the night in company of a Yank who you would take the long way home, in fact it was highly desired. The girls always smelt like cigarettes and couldn’t live without Eye-Lite. When the R-n-R began to dry up the girls talents were snapped up by Sammy Lee at Les Girls who were experiencing one of the many bull periods in their long lustrous history. Not long after Margaret and I parted company she and ten of her waitress mates won first prise in the then Opera House Lottery courtesy of their boss who had bought the ticket as Christmas present for them. Poor Sammy, most other club operators would have kept the winnings themselves but with his Confucian superstitions he dared not not pay up and of course having handed over approximately eleven thousand to each one night (a lot of money in 1969) he had no waitresses the next.

Along with being a “no bullshit” girl Margaret was generous. She owed me nothing nonetheless she came by with a sum of two hundred dollars that she knew was a debt I owed. She bought her brother a sports car, Triumph TR4 as I recollect, as that was all a Strathfield boy, slogging through a medical degree, desired in those days. She purchased a block of land at Wamberal where it seems the family had ancestral holdings and set off with what was left to swinging London. I’m not sure of timing but the following disasters ensured. Rodger the brother crashed his car and lost the sight in one eye blighting his medical future. Mr. had some serious prostate problems and wound up wearing a colostomy bag. Mrs invited Margaret to tea one night and gave her Jewellery, heirlooms, keys and directions to safes and documents and in a matter of days, if not the next, was mysteriously dead. All this as I recollect occurred over a period of five years and thirteen years after Margaret became my first girlfriend I learnt while overseas that she had died in a motor accident.

I suppose a first conjugal girlfriend is bound to occupy a special place in ones heart and memory and Margaret, whose pet name was embarrassingly “Moo” occupies such places in mine.