(Funny how I could find only ONE matching GOOGLE image when
searching for what was then such a ubiquitous image in the 1960s)
Remember when bread was delivered to your door in a bright-red TIP TOP delivery van? Those cute-looking vans were as much part of the Canberra streetscape in the 1960s as were the milk floats and the posties on their red bikes, blowing a whistle as they delivered their mail.
I even sat in one of those bright-red TIP TOP vans by invitation of its driver who was at the time living at Barton House, the same boarding house that has had such a huge influence on me during my formative first two years in Australia and about which I have written more here.
How we ran into each other and what his name was is lost in the mist of time, but I must've looked as forlorn to him then as he now in retrospect looks to me, because he was then already something of a middle-aged bloke with a weather-beaten face who would have looked far less out of place driving a bulldozer than a little van delivering bread door to door.
While I was just starting to claw my way up in life, he may have already been on the way down, and holding on to what he had left by driving that little van. I worked only five days a week with the ANZ Bank, but his deliveries included Saturdays, and so, rather than sitting idly on the front steps of Barton House, I'd hop into the passenger seat and keep him company, as he made his rounds through the suburbs of Canberra.
I remember one particular Saturday morning when he didn't show up. I roughly knew the whereabouts of his room and, after knocking on a couple of doors, opened his and saw him sprawled rather listlessly on his bed. He didn't seem to be in the mood to do his rounds after what might've been a heavy night out before, but I soon disabused him of the notion that staying in bed was the right decision - in rather more basic English than I am using now - and it wasn't long before we were on the way to pick up his deliveries and do the rounds of the suburbs again.
Maybe my intervention in still broken English on that Saturday morning stopped him from getting the sack from a job that held the last vestiges of his former life, and that his future life took a turn for the better. None of us ever know what worse luck our bad luck did save us from.
People in boarding houses are like ships passing in the night: they are all on their way through to somewhere better, and so it was with me not long afterwards. I don't even think I said my good-byes, not to him and not to the many others I ever so briefly befriended in that sad place.
I still think of him sometimes - nameless as he forever shall remain - whenever I hear that old TV jingle "Good on Ya Mum, Tip Tops the One!"
