Charlie Berger told us: "Red Indians, three-year-old human babies and old people are the only ones who run correctly." Before the advent of Berger, athletes often learned to run, toes pointed, arms pumping, head back, body crouched. School and professional coaches were teaching people how not to run. There is another principle, which I have found essential for all good teaching and coaching - in music, school or sport: concentrate on one fault, the worst, and eradicate that. Only then go on to the next fault and so on. This precept has resulted in some success for me as a teacher in the composition of music.
When, after a few years, I went to Trinity Grammar School, Melbourne, I managed to apply what I'd previously been taught and brought the school's athletics team from last to first in the Combined Schools Sports. Some of the Trinity athletes went on to become champions. My biggest success was Ray Weinberg, who became a champion Australian hurdler and a fine coach.
Now, in the day of T.V. athletics, it is interesting to watch the running styles. Most of the best athletes have the Charlie Berger style. De Castella uses strength, a useful alternative and, provided the head, heart and legs are strong, it will succeed. My heart and head were all right, above average, but from somewhere I'd inherited skinny legs. There was nothing I could do about them. The more, I ran, the thinner they got. In one year with Charlie Berger, I'd improved enough to be among the best middle-distance runners in Australia. I represented Western Australia and Victoria and was in the training squad for the 1940 Olympics in Helsinki. Those Games never eventuated and I am sure I would not have been selected anyway. It takes more than a good style and the world's thinnest legs to make a true champion. Instead, I became more interested in musicianship and teaching others to run - and I was obliged to go to war eventually.
My mother and father moved to Perth again in 1935 and I decided to apply for a job at Wesley College there. I was successful and with my sister, Florence, went to Fremantle in the Adelaide Steamship steamer, Manoora. Florence had been left behind in Melbourne, when our parents moved westward again. Father was to become Commander in Chief of the Salvation Army in Western Australia. When they left, Florence lived with an ex-Salvation Army officer, who'd burned his red guernsey and was preaching freelance without the Army's "blood and fire". Mrs Abel, mother of the ex-officer, was one of my mother's best friends. I never doubted their Christianity and this was supposed to be evident in their continued support of Mr Menzies, but they were somewhat unmindful in naming their only child, Noel. Imagine his continuous consternation when asked his name. "Noel Abel," he would answer and then shudder when the retort would come: "Why don't you have a label?"
I rescued Florence from the kindness, cooking and the religion of the Abels and together we sailed to Perth. It was a rough passage, but I discovered that one couldn't be seasick while jogging or eating. However, conversely, one cannot jog or eat while being seasick. I began jogging before the Manooraleft Melbourne and kept it going all the way across. Most passengers left the fresh air and sea and jogging to me. I was a jogger before it became a universal disease.
Strenuous sport will inevitably leave the exerciser in later years with at least ten focal points for aches or pains, or worse. If joints could speak, they would certainly speak out against that extraordinary N.S.W. disease called Rugby League. Now joggers can begin at seventy or eighty years of age if they take it carefully. Young Joggers will probably have worn their joints out by that age.
After our arrival in Perth, Florence became temporary secretary to the British conductor, Sir Malcolm Sargent, during his Perth visit, and she was a temporary Soldier of the Cross as well. [During my time at Wesley College in 1936-37] it was a school among schools. It was unique. Under Dr J.L. Rossiter, it was an efficient operation, probably equalled only by the Catholic Church or the Royal Navy. It was clean, academically strenuous and exhilarating for the boys who went there. Discipline for both dayboys and boarders was effective. The boys seemed to revel in it. The school spirit was worth writing anthems about. Dr Rossiter was happy, Mrs Rossiter was happy, the headmasters' assistant was happy and the parents were happy. The majority of the staff, however, were overworked and underpaid. Only those who had wives and homes in the suburbs seemed to bear it. The discipline for the boarding-house staff was stricter than for the boarders - and the boarders slept in rows strictly at attention, with a prefect in the dormitory and a master at the end of each dormitory. Everybody slept.
My brother, Wesley, was still with our parents when I took up the position at Wesley College. He was a good-natured humorous boy who relished a protected life of safety and kindness. He got on well with everybody, particularly his parents. He was single-minded about art from the very year he was supposed to take his Senior Certificate examinations at the Perth Technical College. As far as I could see, the guilt and sins that weighed heavily on me never touched him. In his final examination, my brother failed every subject except Art, in which he topped his year.
The headmaster summoned father and hit him with the news that Wesley had failed to score a single mark in English. The headmaster was not angry, only stunned. "Let him paint," was my advice. I need not have spoken. When they moved to Melbourne and moved into a house at 59 Bowen Street, Camberwell, father got Wesley a job in a flour mill. Wes acted as though he didn't even hear the proposal. He just went on painting until the house was full of drawings and the walls and ceilings had changed from white to a Michaelangelo-istic kaleidoscope. Every room was thick with the smell of paint and turpentine, crammed with paintings, paper and musical instruments. On the few feet of wall space were books on religion, philosophy and how to fix anything. My parents not only condoned it but also wallowed in it. Some of the nude women would have made Young and Jackson's [famous painting of] Chloeblush. Somehow the self-same parents, who'd once scolded me for carrying a girl's suitcase, now lived unblushingly among mountains of naked flesh - and the devil. Wesley often painted the devil. He painted everything in sight. He even painted the cat.
In 1937 I was selected in the Western Australian team to go to the Australian National Games in Brisbane. After the games I got a job in Melbourne at Trinity Grammar School and soon found out that Methodism is better for scholars, Anglicanism much more comfortable for staff. During my last few months at Wesley, three of the unmarried staff members formed an Oxford Group. We practised Absolute Purity, Love, Unselfishness and Honesty. We prayed, meditated and confessed. It did little good for any of us. I signalled my release from Wesley College by forgetting the Four Absolutes for a start.
The day after the W.A. team reached Brisbane, I won the Queensland pole-vault championship and did not run in the half-mile. I should have landed in the sandpit while doing the pole-vault but landed on the grass instead. In the national championships I hobbled up to the bar and sailed underneath it, sic transit gloria. This prevented any chances I had of being chosen for the 1938 Empire Games. I did some training with du Plessis, the South African who won the Games pole-vault. He gave me his green South African running pants, which later on led me to my first wife. After the vacation, I began teaching at Trinity Grammar, Kew, Melbourne.
The Headmaster, the late Frank Shann, was a totally different kind of principal, a hedonist who believed that boys should be allowed their idiosyncrasies in the boarding house. No matter how much we tried to change things, Shann thwarted us. I don't know whether he believed in Honesty, Purity and Unselfishness, but he certainly did believe in Love, and he was a famous headmaster. After the rigours of Wesley College, Perth, it was, nevertheless, disturbing to me as a boarding-house master, that big boys abused little boys in dormitories and preferred to sleep on the roof rather than in their rooms. My assistant one night caught all the seniors traipsing off to the showers, stark naked with their towels draped over the most convenient peg. For some of their excesses he wanted to belt them with his cricket bat. This was forbidden.
Shann