James Penberthy - Music and Memories. David Reid S.

a little disturbing. I had virtually become a vegetarian by this time and found the greasy roast mutton every day quite revolting. I complained to Shann. "All my life I have lived on boarding school food," he said. He smoked and drank and enjoyed life in every way. There is no doubt about that. He was also a remarkable headmaster. In my first week there I had the temerity to tell him that he would die of a heart attack by the time he was sixty. I may have been a few days out, but it happened.

      Shann's elder son, Frank, became a well-known educationalist too, and headmaster of Hamilton Grammar School, western Victoria. Another son, K.C.O. Shann (Mick), achieved glory by becoming a diplomat. Mick had the best collection of dirty jokes and recordings of the masters of music that I'd met up to 1938. He introduced me to a repertoire of music, which I hadn't known existed. His enthusiasm for good music made him one of my most important influences. I wrote to him when he was ambassador to Japan or somewhere else. He replied that he did not listen to music much any more.

      His elder brother, Frank Junior, almost secured my dismissal from Trinity. One of the boys of 5B (eleven-year-olds), to whom I taught everything except religion, raised an interesting question one day. "You teach us physiology and the systems of the body," said Dickenson, sophisticated son of sophisticated forebears, "and you have left out the most important - the reproductive system."

      "Not I," I said. "It's not in the book." This was not Queensland but Victoria in 1939. It was the era when the righteous used to bash deviates in the Melbourne Domain. Nice people never said "sex" in front of children - they spelt it. I consulted Frank Shann Junior, who was at Trinity at this time. "Will I teach sex?" I asked.

      He was gleeful and answered "Why not? Let's try an experiment. Give them the whole story."

      "O.K.," I said, "but who'll tell the old man?"

      "Don't tell him," Frank chuckled.

      I did, however, call a meeting of parents. They all turned up one evening and sat on seats usually occupied by their sons. I got full approval and away we went - full descriptions in Latin and English words. After this course, there was nothing more to explain. No longer were there sniggers at double meanings. All those who'd been worried about something revealed their problems in front of all. Most of the boys in 5B were Dr A.E. Floyd's choristers from St Paul's Cathedral and some of them had problems. Young Gerry was brave enough to bare all. When he was three years old he was urinating through the chicken-house wire one day. The rooster had pecked the end off.

      "Will I still be able to have children?" he 'd asked in front of the class.

      "How much did you lose?" I asked. "The end? The middle? The lot?"

      "The very end bit," he said.

      "No problem, you may go forth and multiply," I assured him.

      The whole class seemed pleased. I set a question in the exam paper. "Describe the reproductive system of birds, bees and humans." The paper had to be handed in for checking. I was summoned to the headmaster's office. There were no preliminaries. "I will not have this question placed on an exam paper in this school. I will stake my reputation that this sort of thing should not be placed on an exam paper or discussed in public."

      "If you take it off the paper, I'll resign," I said.

      "I accept," he snapped, so I went to start packing. As I waited in my room to cool down, I began to think. "We have won the athletics and we have an orchestra, described in the newspaper as the best school orchestra in Australia. He'll back down." He sent his wife to tell me [that he had?]. Perhaps I should have left in a hurry. Had I gone then, I may have kept the vow I'd made to my mother: "I won't marry, Mum," I'd promised, "and we'll go on a trip to the Old Country." But I did not keep my promise.

      It happened this way. I trained the football team, the athletics team and supervised boarders from four in the afternoon through the night until nine the next morning. I was training hard at athletics and writing music for the school orchestra. Almost everything the school orchestra played was written by me and I even got my first opera, "Peter Pan", produced at the school by Alma Sylvester, later commander of the women's army. I was exhausted and on edge. The only time for training was after lights out at night. I contracted scarlet fever, diphtheria, golden staff or a mixture, or something else, which almost killed me. The medical superintendent of the Infectious Diseases Hospital called in the family for a farewell visit. The medical superintendent was an Old Trinity Grammarian. "Let's give him private nursing," he suggested. Sister Helen Wakefield took over the chore, got all systems going again and within one month I was back at work. "And marry the first girl you see," she advised as I waved goodbye. I obliged her almost to the letter.

      One of Dr Floyd's choirboys had a sister. "Yes," she would mend my South African Empire Games running pants. They came back with my initials embroidered in gold just below the waist. The girl was nineteen, tall and good-looking with dark eyes and a love of music. Her name was Dorothy Kerin, but they called her Judy, and she lived with her mother in a boarding house in Kew. When I first caught sight of her I became convinced that there was more to life than eternally being housemaster in a boarding school. Soon after the presentation of the South African running pants, Judy got into the habit of making her way across the grounds of the two colleges. On these visits, I played to her selections from my gramophone records, while lying on the floor of my housemaster's rooms. Sometimes I dashed across the playing fields to her place.

      One night I [arrived at the boarding house after Judy and her mother had gone to bed in the same large room. I was kneeling in earnest but quiet conversation beside Judy's bed.] The lights were out and her mother was in another bed only three feet away. She was wide-awake! Soon after this her mother introduced the subject which had never crossed my mind - marriage! I was shocked but had to face the fact that this was a situation from which there could be no easy escape. And so we were married [in August 1940] in my father's house with my father officiating. Judy wore a butter-coloured dress and looked extremely beautiful. We made our vows in a room appropriately adorned with murals of women with no clothes on. There was no way of avoiding the bacchanalian intrusion of my brother's paintings. Every room in the house was decorated with the same "shameful" art works. My best man was a Presbyterian clergyman's son named "Lofty" Elliot. "Lofty" enjoyed the decor and, after the ceremony, whisked us away to a discreet hideaway in the Melbourne hills.