FERDINAND: So – another move for my human family and me.
The beginning of 1977 found us on the Gold Coast. At first, we lived in Palm Beach, before settling in a quiet area behind Surfers Paradise.
As we mentioned earlier, several other members of Martin’s Mum’s family came out to Australia from England. Most of them eventually returned to England, but two of Martin’s aunts stayed in Queensland, with their families. Martin’s cousins provided some company for him – much-needed company, as it turned out.
Because of all the family’s travels, Martin was “out of step” with the Queensland education system at the time, and so his Mum and Dad made the decision that he should finish his schooling by correspondence.
As a teddy bear, I was not consulted, but I definitely felt this was a bad idea. It made my human even more isolated at a time (going into his teenage years) when he really needed to be with others. I remember those long days, sitting by him in his room as he slogged through his correspondence classes. Some days, to be honest, he spent more time dreaming than working.
He continued to study the French language by correspondence, sending and receiving cassette tapes for the pronunciation exercises. He also did economics as one of his subjects and hated it; he says he wouldn’t recognize the GDP if it came up and bit him on the nose!
He did this correspondence course for three years, doing a final exam to get his high school certificate at the end of 1979. He had to go to a nearby high school to take the exam with other kids. He passed, though his marks were not particularly good. He later told me that an attractive female teacher was supervising the exams, and she distracted him, especially as she was showing a bit of leg. And on that subject…
MARTIN: Err…
FERDINAND: We really need to talk about it now! It’s not as if you’re the only human it happened to.
MARTIN (reluctantly): Okay.
FERDINAND: Martin was into his teens now and his hormones were starting to fire up. It seemed to me that he went quite suddenly from having no interest in the female body to being totally obsessed with it. He became a lot more interested in the local newspapers, particularly the Gold Coast Sun, which regularly featured photographs of bikini-clad females in its pages.
As regards the mechanics of sex, Martin did see a sex education film before leaving Daramalan, so at least he had some idea of what was happening to him when puberty set in! He has told me that his parents were embarrassed by sex and never gave him a proper “birds and bees” talk – an all too common Catholic problem, I fear.
At the same time, unfortunately, my human seemed to be losing confidence in a lot of areas. Although issues to do with “body image” and appearance seem to be more common with human girls than boys, I think Martin may have developed a negative view of his own body around this time, which affected his worsening self-esteem.
He has always been physically a bit clumsy, and was never good at sport, so he came to believe his body was not strong or “masculine” enough. Furthermore, in his adolescence he became very thin and scrawny, and he became prone to acne.
MARTIN: I also had crowded teeth, and had to have four teeth taken out to relieve the crowding. I’ve never forgotten the dentist looking at a cast they had made of my teeth and saying, “Mate, if you were a horse, we’d have to shoot you!”
Anyway, all of these imperfections were magnified in my mind until, basically, I started to think I was grotesque — that I belonged in a jar in a natural history museum! And it has taken me a long time to get over that insecurity.
FERDINAND: Like a lot of kids his age, Martin found something to escape into: music…. in particular, rock and roll! As we mentioned earlier, he had not been seriously interested in any type of music until now, except for a desultory interest in classical music. But now he became an avid collector of rock music on vinyl discs, the preferred format in those days…. And he loved playing them loud, often to his mum’s annoyance! Watching Countdown, hosted by the enthusiastic, but frequently semi-articulate, Ian “Molly” Meldrum, became part of the weekly ritual, and my human would eagerly wait for the announcement of the weekly Top Ten bestselling records.
The two new interests (sex and music, if I can put it like that) dovetailed rather neatly. Some attractive female singers helped with this process, particularly Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac, who remains to this day, in Martin’s words, one of the loves of his life. The English singer-songwriter Kate Bush, a dark-haired beauty with an extraordinary upper vocal range, was also an early crush of his, as were Ann and Nancy Wilson of the band Heart, and the leather-clad Suzi Quatro.
But I hasten to add that he liked the music as well .He particularly liked Queen, fronted by the flamboyant Freddie Mercury.
And in fact, a former Fleetwood Mac guitarist, Bob Welch, became one of Martin’s favorite musicians and singers; his LP called French Kiss was one of the first albums Martin bought. Martin was devastated when Bob Welch tragically committed suicide in 2012.
MARTIN: That was a very sad day for me. I felt as though part of my youth had died. Some things affect you that way.
FERDINAND: Martin admired (and still admires) guitarists such as Eric Clapton and Carlos Santana, and bass players such as John Entwistle of the Who; and he attempted to learn the bass guitar himself a bit later as we shall see.
My human’s interest in films also increased at this time. This tied in with his love of science fiction; the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope, was released in 1977 and was I think the film that made him into a movie buff. This was followed over the next few years by other science fiction and horror movies including Star Trek – the Motion Picture, which reunited him with the crew of the USS Enterprise, and Alien, starring the statuesque Sigourney Weaver, who became another one of my human’s numerous crushes.
His reading took a somewhat darker and more gruesome turn in his adolescent years. He started to read horror stories; he had already read Dracula a few years earlier, but now he started to seriously get into the horror genre. He was soon immersing himself in the works of H. P. Lovecraft, who remains one of his all-time favorite writers. … You wanted to say something about this?
MARTIN: Oh, yes! I have prepared something … ahem.
Many of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories concern a race of godlike alien beings, the Great Old Ones, who once ruled the Earth and many other planets, were kicked out after a cosmic war, and are always trying to come back. You can bring them back, and get them to do things for you if you say the right incantations at the right time. So Lovecraft neatly straddles the border between science fiction and horror.
This back-story became known as the Cthulhu Mythos, after Cthulhu (pronounced “Kthooloo”), one of the Great Old Ones who is said to be sleeping in a sunken city somewhere beneath the Pacific Ocean. Other writers started to use Lovecraft’s mythology and ideas, and in fact, the Cthulhu Mythos survives to this day, with movies, computer games, new books, and everything,
What I liked about Lovecraft was that he wrote about this wonderful, terrifying, magical world that was just around the corner from ours – and you could get into that world in dreams (in his “dreamlands” stories), or by saying the right spells to summon the Great Old Ones, or just by going to the right places such as Innsmouth.
When I first discovered Lovecraft, I saw him as a great “religious” writer in a way, as there was this supernatural world always trying to come into our world in his stories. Ironically, Lovecraft himself was an agnostic bordering on atheism, and regarded most religious beliefs as “moonshine”{6}. But there is a tremendous sense of wonder as well as terror in his stories, to which I certainly responded.
And there is a darker side to his stories as well – he saw the universe as being ultimately indifferent to humanity – and that underlying pessimism may well have appealed to me also.
Incidentally, Lovecraft was quite politically incorrect by today’s standards. He was unapologetically racist and his dislike for Asians, people of African backgrounds, and just about anyone who wasn’t a white Anglo-Saxon, is clear from many of his stories. And on that point, it might not be a coincidence that in his stories, the ultimate horror seems to be mating with a creature from another species or another dimension; this is a plot point in two of his best stories, The Dunwich Horror and The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
Despite his faults, H. P. Lovecraft had a huge impact on me, and was really one of the people who…well, “opened the gates of my imagination” is the phrase I came up with.
FERDINAND: As you may have noticed, when my human gets obsessed, he really gets obsessed! By the way, HP Lovecraft is noted for often using big words and long sentences. I suspect this was one of the things that triggered Martin’s own love of big words, which I noticed coming into play around this time.
MARTIN: Me using big words? That’s an egregious animadversion!
FERDINAND: (Sighs wearily) I rest my case…
Martin’s Mum also tried to get in on the act occasionally. She started using big words, but she would often use them wrongly: “don’t do that, darling, you might get exacerbated” or “you might get concupiscent!” And she once said that Martin had a “contorted sense of humor”, which caused him to laugh so hard I really thought he was going to injure himself.
MARTIN: Yeah. Mum also had her own way of pronouncing some words. She used to pronounce “antique” as “antwakky”!
FERDINAND: After Lovecraft and his friends, Martin moved on to other horror fiction writers such as Stephen King, James Herbert, and Dean Koontz. He also loved (and still loves) the great British ghost story writer M. R. James, who was an influence on Lovecraft and many others….
MARTIN: Yep– Montague Rhodes James. I would suggest that he wrote not just one but three of the most terrifying short stories ever: “Count Magnus”, “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”, and “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”. Absolute spine-chillers.
FERDINAND: Anyway, while my human was doing his correspondence course, his parents suggested he get involved in amateur theatre, as a way of having interaction with other people. This was certainly one of their best ideas, although Martin was becoming shyer and shyer by this time and he would never have done it without being pushed.
Fortunately, the Gold Coast has quite a few amateur theatre companies. At first, Martin joined a group called the Spotlight Theater Company, which tended to focus on musicals. He went to a few rehearsals for Showboat, which they were putting on at the time, but his lack of dancing skills (he has always had two left feet!) meant that he felt out of place there. He moved to another company called the Gold Coast Little Theatre and had more success there.
He joined their junior section, and worked at first behind the scenes, doing the lighting for one play.
But then he found he did have a talent for acting and found himself in demand for, I suppose you could say, character parts. One of his first major roles was as the well meaning but rather idiotic StJohn Rivers in Jane Eyre. He did have one nightmarish moment when he froze and forgot his lines, and “Jane” had to improvise a line to get out of the situation. Generally, though, he turned out to be quite good at acting.
Inevitably, because of his raging hormones, he developed crushes on a few of the girls in the theatre company. The first was a redheaded girl called Vicki… and I notice that he has retained a weakness for redheads ever since...(To Martin) No comment? Stubborn silence? Very well.
Martin acted with Vicki in one play and apparently, she was the first girl ever to kiss him, on a purely friendly basis, after a rehearsal.
Vicki, despite her lack of formal acting training, went to Los Angeles to try and make the big time. Sadly, my human does not know what happened to her after that.
One of the other girls in the Gold Coast Little Theatre at that time was Nikki McWatters, who later became an author and journalist. Martin sometimes saw Nikki, who also came from a Catholic family, playing the organ at St Vincent’s Church in Surfers Paradise – something she didn’t enjoy at all, according to her memoir, One Way Or Another.{7}
Martin’s most famous role, if I can call it that, came after he had been in the GCLT for a couple of years. He was cast as Boswell, a large talking golliwog, in Conversations with a Golliwog. This was a one-act play by the New Zealand playwright Alexander Guyan, concerning a teenage girl with mental problems who talks to her golliwog, and believes he talks back to her. She also believes that Boswell is writing her biography – much as I am helping Martin with his!
Martin found he was able to give a good performance vocally, making Boswell rather British and grumpy, but physically the part had its difficulties. As well as wearing the costume and mask, Martin had to stay still most of the time, as Boswell only came to life and spoke to Canny when he and she were alone.
Still, the part proved a triumph for my human, and he won a “best performance” trophy at the GCLT’s annual drama festival that year – something he still treasures. He and the rest of the cast later went up to Brisbane, to take part in the much bigger Warana drama festival, but were not as successful. Of course, Martin developed a crush on his leading lady, a blonde girl named Kim. But Kim was in great demand and Martin was far too shy to do anything about it anyway.
In 1980, he acted in a play with the adult (rather than junior) section of the GCLT. This was The Sky is Overcast by Anthony Booth, another one-act play. Set in France during World War II, it concerns a downed British airman who seeks help from the French resistance, but turns out to be a Gestapo agent. My human played the duplicitous airman, even though he was probably too young at 18. His performance did gain some favorable attention, with his still recognizably English accent being a great help.
After that Martin wrote a play, at the suggestion of Molly Leggett, the wonderfully energetic lady who was in charge of the Little Theatre’s junior section. The play, probably inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, concerned a man who died during a hypnosis experiment, and whose ghost then haunted the hypnotist. It was performed as a public play reading at the GCLT.
At Christmas 1980, Martin went back to the Spotlight Theatre Company when they put on Jesus Christ Superstar. This was quite a big production— the biggest my human ever took part in. James Fishburn, a media professional who had worked in television, was the director. Given his background, he did not suffer fools gladly. My human had a minor part as one of the Jewish High Priest’s guards, and he told me how at one rehearsal he moved the wrong way, blocking one of the High Priest’s moves. Jim Fishburn said nothing, but gave my human a look that, he says, almost burned him up on the spot.
Coincidentally, about this time a film called Goodbye Paradise was filmed on the Gold Coast. My human tried to get a part, no matter how small; he recalls talking to the casting director and the stunt supervisor, but nothing eventuated. The film, which starred well-known Aussie actor Ray Barrett, came out in 1983, but seems to have been a flop.
The year 1980 was a difficult one for my human. After completing his correspondence course he was mostly unable to find work. He signed up (reluctantly) for unemployment benefits, but was often sent for jobs for which he had no aptitude, including working in the kitchen at a restaurant. I should mention that Martin has never been able to cook; his few experiments in the kitchen have generally been disastrous. He didn’t get the job in the restaurant, probably because he cut himself with a kitchen knife and bled into the salad.
He did get some work “stuffing” letterboxes (distributing advertising materials) but not much else. This all contributed to his periods of black depression, in which he would feel isolated and worthless.
Now, teddy bears, being telepathically linked to our owners, can feel their major emotions, and it is a very painful thing for a well-meaning bear to see (and telepathically feel) his human growing more and more miserable, and be unable to do anything about it.
However, the next year, 1981, brought some improvements. Martin attended some evening classes – including a writing course - with the Gold Coast TAFE College, which helped to keep his mind occupied. And an even more exciting opportunity came when he was offered work experience at the local newspaper, the Gold Coast Bulletin. He worked there for about two weeks. It did not lead to a permanent job but he certainly enjoyed his time there, and appreciated his first real paycheck!
Stevie Nicks – the singer who, you may remember, Martin still regards as one of the loves of his life – had just released her first solo album, called BellaDonna, and Martin wrote a review of it which was published in the Bulletin, much to his pride.
It was also in 1981 that Martin had to start wearing glasses to correct his shortsightedness. He confided to me that the first time he attended a church service wearing his glasses, his sense of perspective was all thrown out, so that when the priest stood in front of a vase of flowers on the altar, it looked as though the flowers were coming out of the priest’s head. (He stops and looks thoughtful).
MARTIN: What is it?
FERDINAND: When I mentioned this to another bear I know, he said his owner had experiences like that in the 1960’s, but I’m not sure what he meant by that.
MARTIN: Ha ha! I’ll explain later!
FERDINAND: Thank you.
As I have said, I think it was particularly unfortunate that my human was so isolated (studying by correspondence, then unemployed) at this period. It worsened his shyness, and left him with feelings of unworthiness, of self-doubt, which would plague him for a long time to come. He grew up thinking he was a loner, and it took him a long time to find out that he can be quite a sociable person!
But, although 1981 did not bring my human much in the way of work or social success, it did see him make a decision about what he wanted to do with his life.