So, in mid-1974 we found ourselves back in Australia. This time we were sent to Canberra, the geometrically designed capital city that was meant to be Australia’s answer to Washington, DC.
When we first arrived, we lived in a large hostel, one of several that were built for public servants as Canberra was expanding in the 1920’s. Ours was called Brassey House, and it’s now a privately owned hotel.
Martin served as an altar boy at St Christopher’s, the Catholic Cathedral, a couple of times. Once, he served Mass for a very enthusiastic and charismatic young priest, and his Dad laughingly commented, “You’ll have to put your skates on if you want to beat him to the papacy!” Afterwards, we moved to a house in the suburb of Hawker, and my human gave up the altar boy business.
Martin was enrolled at Daramalan College, which gets its name from an Aboriginal word meaning, “Eagle man” or “Eagle men”. This is a Catholic school run by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic order of priests and brothers founded in Issoudun, France by Fr. Jules Chevalier in 1854.
This congregation’s members are usually known as MSC’s from the letters they put after their names. The MSC’s run quite a number of schools and parishes in Australia, and they would have a major impact on Martin’s life, as we shall see.{5}
Daramalan was a boys-only school in those days, though it later became co-educational. Among Martin’s teachers was Fr Frank Andersen MSC, who would later become a well-known composer of hymns (including the highly popular “Eagle’s Wings”). He had the somewhat thankless task of teaching my human mathematics.
Another colorful character at the school was Dr North, a layman who taught French and Spanish. He was a somewhat forbidding personage with thick glasses and a long, hooked nose who always wore a black academic gown. Despite his intimidating appearance, he was a good if a somewhat eccentric teacher.
Incidentally, it has always been one of my human’s oddities that he is excellent in the English language, with a great command of words and grammar, but he has never really been good at languages other than English. He did learn a bit of French, starting in Trinidad and continuing in Australia when we returned, but he never really excelled in it.
Indeed, in one French class, he made an extremely embarrassing mistake. The French words for “fishing” and “sinning” are very similar, so Martin ended up writing a French essay about “two men sinning in a boat.” He has never forgotten the look Dr. North gave him…. (Chuckles).
MARTIN: Ferdinand?
FERDINAND: Sorry… I, um, had a loose bit of stuffing caught in my throat.
MARTIN: You’ll have my fist caught in it if you aren’t careful!
FERDINAND: Martin struggled with the French accent, as well as the grammar. And that brings me to make a point about my owner’s accent. Despite leaving Britain at such a young age, Martin has kept a recognizably British accent to this day.
MARTIN: Yes, and I realize that’s a bit strange. From what I have read, immigrant kids usually pick up their schoolmates’ accents. Without wanting to sound self-pitying, I would put it down to lack of friends, love of reading, and watching too much Doctor Who! I know I’ve got a mixed-up Anglo-Australian accent, and I’ve been told I even have a slight trace of a “north country” accent, obviously inherited from my adoptive Mum and Dad.
I got picked on for my accent at Daramalan — “Pommy bastard” and all that. Just had to live with it.
FERDINAND: My poor old human…
MARTIN: Less of the “old,” please!
FERDINAND: …had only one or two close friends who he would usually see at lunch and other break times. This unpopularity reduced his enjoyment of his time at Daramalan, much as he loved some of the classes.
MARTIN: You know, I think I dealt with all this moving around in my early life by developing a romantic idea of myself as an Englishman in exile. I still thought of England as my homeland, and my love of British shows like Doctor Who became part of that. Even you, as my faithful teddy bear, were a sort of reminder of the old country. Britishness became something I hung on to as part of my identity, even though I got abused because of my accent! So I wanted to belong and yet I also wanted to stand out, to be different. All very confusing.
FERDINAND: Belonging and standing out…Yes, I’ve noticed that humans can want two contradictory things at the same time.
Sadly, in my human’s early life, the desire to belong and have friends often went unmet and brought him grief. I think he came to believe he was meant to be a loner. It was only in later years that he realized he could be a sociable person, and that he could actually enjoy having other human beings around him.
MARTIN: Correctamundo!
FERDINAND: Err…
MARTIN: Sorry. I won’t say that again.
FERDINAND: Please don’t. Anyway, at Daramalan, my human continued to find solace in reading. Around this time he read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, both of which remain among his all-time favorite books.
He also enjoyed music classes, taught by Fr. Arthur Braithwaite MSC. This gave him a love of various kinds of music even though he has never become a proficient musician.
In fact, one of the other music teachers at the school played the bass guitar, and my human admits that he was impressed by the way a bass player could shake a whole building just by plucking a string or two! The bass remains probably his favorite instrument, and it was the instrument with which he had the most success, as we shall see.
While at Daramalan, however, he didn’t become a fully-fledged fan of popular music; that would come later. He claimed to be a fan of classical music and would throw around names like Mozart and Beethoven and Stravinsky, though he wasn’t really serious about it.
MARTIN: True. I was probably becoming a bit of a pretentious little so-and-so, but anyway…
FERDINAND: Still on the subject of music, Martin went with his Dad (at the music teacher’s recommendation) to see the German electronic band Tangerine Dream when they came to Canberra. It was a somewhat otherworldly experience, with the three members of the band sitting on a mostly darkened stage, not talking to the audience, and allowing the drifting synthesized music to speak for itself. So that was his first “live gig”!
On the other paw… The other hand, sorry I keep forgetting I’m writing for humans and not my fellow bears….
MARTIN: Focus, Ferdinand!
FERDINAND: On the other hand, although he was academically bright, Martin was (and still is) quite physically clumsy and uncoordinated. This caused him problems in school.
Things like woodwork classes, and of course Physical Education classes, were a torture to him! Indeed, for a long time, Martin lived in fear of the gym teacher – named, appropriately, Mr. Foot.
This has, in fact, been a lifelong problem for Martin: a complete inability to do anything requiring much in the way of physical coordination. He says he was born with two (or more) left hands and left feet.
MARTIN: Imagine a drunken octopus! That’s about how well coordinated I am most of the time.
FERDINAND: Martin has, I regret to say, only vague memories of some of the historic events that happened around this time. He remembers sitting in the classroom and one of the priests coming in to tell the boys that the Vietnam War had just ended. And he also remembers the news coverage when the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in November 1975. But he admits that these things did not affect him personally and he did not take much interest in them at the time!
Then in 1977 we moved yet again…
MARTIN: To a warmer climate, fortunately!
FERDINAND: Yes – this time it was to Queensland’s Gold Coast. Do you have anything to add, Martin?
MARTIN: By this time I think I had accepted – not happily accepted, but accepted - that my life was just a constant series of moves from one place to another. I remember I did write a couple of letters, while I was in Canberra to my friends in Trinidad, but we soon dropped out of touch. And I don’t think I made any attempt at all to stay in touch with my Daramalan classmates after I left there. I just accepted that I would never stay in one place very long, and there wasn’t really any point in trying to hang on to old friends.
I went through a phase later on when I resented by my adoptive parents for all these moves, but I accept now that they were just trying to create a better life for themselves and for me – just as my birth mother gave me away for adoption so that I could have a better life.
But it has taken me a long time (into my fifties!) to reach that level of acceptance. Back then, in my school days, I think I just buried my sadness and put up with this fairly unstable lifestyle as best I could.