The End of the Affair

 

Watch the movie in a separate window by clicking on Watch on YouTube

 

When people talk about their fondness for books, I wonder if they’re really talking about their fondness for reading. It’s rather like confusing the plate for the food. I mean, I like a beautifully printed and bound book as much as anybody else but I don’t need a houseful of them, any more than I need a houseful of beautiful dinner plates. About twelve would do fine; that, and a good recipe book."

Just as Somerset Maugham kept "A Writer's Notebook", I jotted down the above quote in my notebook some time ago but forgot to add its source. It may have been Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future" - in fact, I'm pretty sure it was - but don't quote me on it. I was reminded of it as I leaved through a beautifully bound copy of "The Quiet American" at the Vinnies op-shop and wondered if I should buy it. I already own all of Graham Greene's book, but unlike Douglas Adams — and stretching his metaphor almost to breaking-point — I can’t help feeling some food tastes better when eaten off a beautiful plate.

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org

 

A woman, already with an armful of books, looked at the spine of my book and asked me if I could recommend a book by Graham Greene. "Why don't you try 'The End of the Affair'?" I suggested. "What, just the end? Not the whole thing?" she replied. On second thoughts, I suggested to her a recently formed book club in the Bay where she didn't have to read at all. As their blurb suggests, "The idea is to have fun and make new friends. We choose books that are easy to read, and that have been made into movies so you don't even have to read if you don't want to".

"The End of the Affair" has been made into a movie twice, but while I have read the book from cover to cover, I have yet to watch the movie to the end. Maybe I will now, if only to see if this quote appears in it:

"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity."   [page 46]

And, yes, I did buy that beautifully bound copy of "The Quiet American".

 

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Smooth and satisfying

 

 

Sixty years after I had drunk my first cup of "smooth and satisfying" International Roast at Barton House, and almost after I had made myself the sixty-sixth cup of coffee from this 100g-tin which promises that it "Makes up to 66 cups", I not only keep scratching the bottom of this tin but also my head as I wonder what to make of the ramblings of our "Leader of the Free World".

"We're very far ahead of schedule", he says, and that the war was "very complete, pretty much", with "nothing left in a military sense", while his Defense Department announces, "This is just the beginning". How short our memories are. Someone should remind the Americans that it took 20 years and $3.5 trillion to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.

The "free world" is lead by an orange man-child, who is one half extreme emotional damage and the other half rambling idiot with no ideas of what he is saying from one sentence to the next. Trump never made any sense, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that he hasn't managed to coherently state his war objectives; indeed, we're left to wonder if he could locate Tehran on a map. "We could call it a tremendous sucess right now ... or we could go further. And we're going further", he says, while the Iranian government announces that they have a huge stockpile of supreme leaders left to inflict more damage. In the meantime, there has been a sudden rush on football uniforms as women in the Middle East are trying to seek refuge in Australia.

I'm again scratching the bottom of the tin because this current state of the world needs more than just one cup of "smooth and satisfying" International Roast, which keeps reminding me of what a much better world looked like when I had my first cup of International Roast more than sixty years ago. Things were then still "smooth and satisfying".

In fact, things also seemed "smooth and satisfying" in what was then still Persia when the Shah-in-Shah was the ruler of the country. Not that I knew much of the country other than what I could read in what was then the German equivalent of "The Women's Weekly" about Soraya and, subsequently, about Farah Diba, the second wife he married to maintain the dynasty. I remember my mother reading a Bertelsmann book simply titled, "Soraya". It was kept in a glass cabinet under lock and key for no discernible reason, but here it is again, in a movie remake from 2003.

 

 

I learned a bit more about Persia when I went there in January 1976 as accountant for the Williams pipeline company. I had just come out of tropical Burma and Tehran was freezing cold and I didn't last very long, but neither did the Shah who went into exile in 1979 and died in 1980.

 

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This could've been me!

 

 

I've met a few Mr Simpkins in my time but I never aspired to follow in their footsteps.

Instead, I used the bit of parchment that suggested that I had qualified as an accountant as my passport to travel the world. Some 7,300 days nett and fifteen countries later, I finally settled down.

I did squash a few eclairs but I don't have 2.4 children nor do I keep a budgie although it's probably fair to say that I'm a total social failure.

 

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The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language

 

 

The handwritten dedication on the flyleaf reads, "To my darling Lee, Happy Birthday, Love Sue 8/95", and to ensure that darling Lee would fully appreciate the gift, loving Sue had left the Chatswood ABC Bookshop's sales docket dated 27/08/95 for $75 as a handy bookmark inside the book.

It stayed there for over thirty years until I picked up the same book yesterday at Vinnies in Moruya for a mere two dollars. Wayne the Bookwhisperer, who prices all of Vinnies' books and thinks nothing of slapping a $10 price on a second-hand copy of "Fifty Shades of Grey", knows his fellow-Moruyans well enough to realise that an encyclopedia of the English language wouldn't exactly fly off the shelf, hence the cheap price for what is still an almost pristine copy which even darling Lee didn't seem to have looked at much in all those thirty years. Look, I don't mean to denigrate those who prefer "Fifty Shades of Grey" to this beautifully produced encyclopedia of the English language - and for those people who do, let me explain that denigrate means "put down" - but for me this was the find of the week.

I love reading about words; I love writing with words; I love listening to words; in fact, words are all we have, you and I, as you sit in front of your computer and I sit and tap at my keyboard, but words failed me as I listened to the news on the car radio on the drive home. According to one piece of news, an estimated 5.5 million, or close on 20% - TWENTY PERCENT!!! - of the entire Australian population has a disability and many are on the payroll with the euphemistically called and much abused National Disability Insurance Scheme, or NDIS. Even the word "insurance" is an abuse because, according to the Oxford dictionary, "insurance" is "an arrangement with a company in which you pay them regular amounts of money and they agree to pay the costs, for example, if you die or are sick, or if you lose or damage something such as your health, your life, your possessions, etc." No-one pays any amount of money, regular or otherwise, into the NDIS, other than the other 80% of Australia's long-suffering taxpayers who are currently being hit with some $45 BILLION - a figure which is estimated to DOUBLE by 2031-2032 - so that little old ladies can fritter away their time playing bingo at the Returned and Services League Club while NDIS-provided personal carers dust their venetian blinds and clean their bathrooms and kitchens and mow their front lawns, and revoltingly obese men with tattoos all over them can come to the swimming pool attended by their NDIS-provided personal carers in a futile attempt to lose the excess weight they accumulated through an alcohol-induced lifestyle. I am not exaggerating - I have met several of both kinds! The NDIS has become the new #MeToo movement: where once they prided themselves on the number of pills they took, they now take pride that their NDIS-package is bigger than yours!

The NDIS was one of those Labor government ideas which, as well-meaning as it might have been, has completely gone off the rails, and is now almost impossible to rein back in. A recent case in point was an unsuccessful attempt to stop paying for sex workers attending to the "personal needs" of disabled people which resulted in a major outcry and the repeated mention of "human rights". I am all for looking after the nation's truly disabled but free sex workers? What next? Free P&O cruises? This is unaffordable and corrupting welfare on steroids!

Perhaps by the time the Chinese arrive on our shores to freshen up our sadly depleted gene pool, our nation will be girth by wheelchairs occupied by one half - many of whom would be better off if they tried to keep fit by walking - while the other half serves them caffé lattes and cleans their venetian blinds, if indeed they are not also attending to their more "personal needs". And there are supposed to be people who complain that we waste too much of taxpayers' money on the AUKUS submarine deal!

As for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language which has already entertained me for hours and re-activated brain cells I had almost forgotten I had, if you know someone called Lee whose birthday is in August, please give him my thanks for having left it in such pristine condition by hardly ever using it. I'm making up for all that lost time!

 

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After Hillside, it's been all downhill

 

A sketch of the Hillside Hostel by Walter Dubrow, c.1957

 

When I first came to Canberra, I moved into a place called Hillside Hostel because it sat on a hill, but not just any hill – it was on Capital Hill, which is where the New Parliament House now stands. The wide expanse of Capital Hill had been significant for Hillside because local residents had complained about the proposed construction of a men's hostel in their suburb. Capital Hill was a compromise; it kept the men away from the general populace, from the housewives across the city. It kept them safe.

Aside from its conspicuous location, Hillside was so notorious because it had the worst living conditions. The rooms were spartan apart from the dust and cobwebs. They smelt of linseed oil from the bulky brown linoleum tiles curling up on the floor. Dirty yellow newspaper sheets were laid out under the lino covering the pine floorboards. The mattresses were horse hair and riddled with fleas. The walls were one hundred percent pure unadulterated asbestos. Roofs were galvanised, with pools of water that collected in the corridors.

There was never any hot water, which meant that showers were taken cold. In the middle of a Canberra winter, this was especially bracing. The men were given one towel per week – holey, stained, malodorous – along with slivers of soap. The shower blocks had no tiles, doors, curtains or dividers.

In the mess, a bottle of black sauce half full of sediment sat in the middle of each table alongside two empty sauce bottles filled with salt and sugar. On Saturday mornings, the scrambled eggs – made from dried egg powder – tasted of fish fried in the same aluminium pan the night before. The porridge was sugary sweet and attracted swarms of blowflies.

The occupants were a chaos of cultures: Poles, Maltese, Yugoslavs, Balts, Greeks. When it came to the Italians and Germans, the memories of the war were still fresh in people's minds. I heard of a few Germans who were told to leave their worksites in the middle of the day simply because the foreman didn't approve of them.

I left Hillside Hostel after a few months when I joined the ANZ Bank who moved me into Barton House in nearby Brisbane Avenue, where most of their single men were billetted. Hillside Hostel finally closed in 1968.

It took another twelve years before work began on building the new Parliament House where the hostel once stood. While Hillside Hostel had seen the odd scuffle or bare-knuckle fistfight, it was nothing compared to the bloodsport that now takes place inside the new Parliament House.

All this came back to me when I discovered this Court Notice hidden away in the backpages of the Canberra Times of Wednesday, 11 June 1952:

 

 

Rudolf "Rudi" Klug had arrived in Melbourne as a "Jennings German" aboard the NAPOLI in 1951, and had like me lived in Hillside Hostel.

 

From October 1961 to February 1952, 150 "Jennings Germans" came to Australia; 12 on the SKAUBRYN, 36 on the NAPOLI, 42 on the CASTEL BIANCO, 53 on the NELLY, and 7 on the ANNA SALEN. For the full German Jennings story, click here

 

He had married, had become an Australian, and had divorced again ...

 

Sydney Airport Arrival Card from October 1969
returning on LUFTHANSA flight LH692 from Frankfurt via Bangkok

 

... and, despite his "criminal record", had become the owner of the multi-million-dollar businesses Canberra Roof Trusses (CRT), CFM Kitchens, and Canberra Fascia Boards by the time I met him sometime in the late 1980s after he had called me to computerise the accounting functions of all his businesses which saved him lots of money and made me quite a bit, too.

His business lives on as CRT Building Products but, judging by his date of birth, I doubt he's still "riding after dark a motor cycle that did not have a rear light showing". Having had you as a client, it's been good knowing you, Rudi, and I trust you enjoy the rest after a long and successful life.

 

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