Running amok

Dennis was initiated early into the mischief and misdemeanors of the Newtown streets. As a young teen he used to run bets for the bookmaker:

He’d give you these addresses and you’d collect their bets, and they’d have thruppence each way, a penny each way, things like that … each day you’d be going back and forwards, taking people their winnings and taking a lot of bets. Tere were other benefits to having kids around for the bookmaker. If he got a tip-of from Newtown police that there’d be a raid, he’d get the girls to hide the betting slips down their Bombay bloomers. Te punters would slip out via the back fence, leaving the girls innocently skipping rope when the police turned up.

When the police would come the girls would be skipping, there’d be cordial and fairy bread, and the bookmaker he’d say,

What you talking about? It’s a kids’ party, no gambling here.

And that was the routine. Tere were lots of ways Dennis made money as a kid back then, some honest and others not. He told me a bloke at the University of Sydney would pay Dennis and a couple of his mates two shillings for every stray cat they brought him to dissect. ‘You tell people that, they’d deny it’, he said, aware of how outrageous it sounded by today’s standards. Tey’d collect glass bottles in a cane pram and sell them to the bottle yard. Full of cheek, they’d steal copper from the metal yard and sell it back to the owner. Collecting vine leaves for the Fish and Chip shop window display could earn Dennis two bob or a serve of chips. And he would keep an eye out for the coppers while his Dadda ran two-up rings after the races and for the brothels on Riley Street of a weekend. He remembered blushing when the Madame of one of the brothels smothered him in a busty embrace and teased that she had made the little fella’s night. Dennis and his little brother, Noel (technically Shirley’s son), looked after the horses at Harry Cohen’s stables. It was their job to clean the

boxes, do track work with the horses at Harold Park, hose and brush them down, clean their hooves, and give them water. Dennis remembers the stables as the place where he and his brother fell for a pair of sisters. One day Harry brought two girls, Cathy and Carol, to the stable. Tey were the daughters of a barmaid at the Marlborough Hotel up the road. ‘It was love at first sight’, Dennis told me. Te girls’ parents were separated so they only stayed with their mother in the school holidays. Noel and Cathy went on to marry and have children. Dennis got distracted by another girl in between holiday visits. Tis didn’t surprise me. When we walked the streets of Newtown together, Dennis pointed out so many houses of past girlfriends that it became a running joke between me and Tom. ‘I’ve always regretted that’, Dennis told me every time Carol came up. Dennis was nostalgic about these days of roaming and running amok. ‘Tey were great old days for kids, Emma!’ he told me. ‘Oh did we get up to some stuf!’

We used to get the fish and chips for dinner and you’d go to the movies. You used to have five shillings. It’d cost you thruppence to get in and at interval time you’d go out and buy a drink, a scorched peanut bar. And from five shillings you’d still come home with spare. Te cinema was a lively place. Tere’d be Jafas flying and kids up on stage for yoyo contests or custard-eating competitions. Sometimes they’d come dressed up. One time Dennis took the invitation to dress up as a cowboy to extremes and rode in on a Shetland pony borrowed from Harry Cohen’s stables where he worked. Te mischief returned to his eyes as he told the story:

Billy was its name. And one day I got dressed up and went down and got Billy from the stable – I should not’ve done it. What we used to do, the kids would go to the toilet and they’d open the door and let you in because you couldn’t pay. And they opened