The day it rained champers in Whitmore Square
Like a rather hungry rottweiler-mastiff-ridgeback cross I once lived with, I’ve never taken much of a shine to people in uniform. Something about dress-ups; something about folks who need to look alike; something about the notion that if you design a uniform, be it spiritual, martial or whatever, some pretender will very quickly swell to fill it.
I was always nervous, for example, about the Salvos, who appear to have had a bad few weeks.
Their uniform is obviously martial masquerading as spiritual, or vice-versa. Whichever way, it’s a combination which to me seems to leave quite a large door open and inviting to people who, to me, would seem to be pretty much my opposite.
Which is not to deny that in the golden over-crowded smoking years of The Exeter, I always made a donation to old Norma the Salvo when she’d do the Friday night rounds of the East End, perfectly uniformed, rattling her donation bag up and down the street from one bar to another, her crusty old civvy-clad cloth-capped knuckle-boxing husband always hovering in her wake, just to keep an eye on the money. He carried a very heavy walking stick.
Norma’s bags would get so heavy they’d leave them behind the bar at The Ex while they cleaned up the rest of the street. I carried one once. It was a lot of money.
One morning when publican Nicholas Binns was on holiday, I shared the front bar with a bloke who’d obviously done a runner from the hospital for a quiet spell with a smoke and a beer. That was commonplace behaviour for many patients. He was down the billiard table end of the bar in a hospital robe with his head bandaged like a mummy. Looked bad. I was up the front, at what was then the dart-board end. The elder Binns, Spencer, was covering for his absent brother behind the jump. There was nobody else there.
Spencer poured me my breakfast stout.
“See that bloke down there?” he asked in a stage whisper. “Who do you reckon that is?”
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“I dunno. Rameses II?”
“Nah,” he said, leaning forward, polishing a glass. “That’s the most wanted man in Australia. That’s Jimmy Coleraine.”
I’d barely had a chance to ask how Spencer could recognise the most wanted man in Australia dressed as a mummy when the bloke under discussion came determinedly up the length of the bar and sat next to me.
“Hullo,” the mummy said, putting his hand forward. “I’m Jimmy Coleraine. How the hell could you tell who I am?”
I said I had no idea who he was. Spencer went down the other end and polished glasses.
Jimmy, a cat burglar and master escapee, was famous for escaping from the horrid maximum-security division at Pentridge Prison, long since shut for humanitarian reasons. He had the screws jinxed: it seemed he could pass through a locked door like a spook. We talked that morning about uniforms, and the types who tended to inhabit them. Salvos, priests, coppers and screws. Etcetera.
Turned out in that his years on the streets and in prisons, Jimmy’d been bashed so much by so many that his face – he pulled some of the bandages to the side to show me – had become such a cobweb of scars it looked like a lace doily. It was time to do something about it. He’d read in the newspapers in Pentridge about the excellent work of the Royal Adelaide Hospital plastic surgery team led by David David, and had checked out and made his way across the border to have his face sorted. Once he’d scored his initial appointment, the doc took one look at his face and became transfixed on one of Jimmy’s cheeks. In the midst of all that scarring he’d spotted a melanoma. So instead of smoothing the countenance of my charming drinking companion, they’d scooped out half the poor bastard’s cheek.
Not happy.
That week I gave Jimmy my Salvo donation many times over once his mysterious government stipend had siphoned itself into Spencer’s accommodating till. In return, he gave me the first chapter of his autobiography, which I still have.
Jimmy taught me a lot about dealing with people in uniform. Obviously a bloke with such a miserable income combined with his need for lots of smokes and drinks would find it a bit tricky to stay in the Hilton. So he stayed round in Whitmore Square, with the Salvos. He’d be locked in there for a week in their drunk tank, fed and watered, until the day his mysterious cheque came in, when he’d bring it round to The Ex and drink it all in one hearty session, then wander back and surrender again to the uniformed folks to clean out. He patiently performed this ritual until his face was vaguely presentable and all the dressings came off.
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Then there was a grand prix ball, when all the ladies of Springfield got their diamonds out of the safe, wore them to Hyatt and went home to bed drunk with the ice left on their bedside tables. Somebody went through the bedrooms of Springfield that night and cleaned out mansion after mansion, tip-toing around the slumbering rich.
I never saw Jimmy again. But I got back at the uniformed Salvo who went inexcusably nuts when I once smuggled Jimmy in a can of VB and a packet of Escorts.
I conducted a huge champagne tasting for Christmas publication, I think in The National Times. It took two whole days, during which my stewards nervously eyed the great stack of expensive bottles building up in the cool room. Dozens of them. Hundreds. I’d bought a shipment of stopper corks, so once I’d sampled my glass from each bottle and made my evaluation, and the stewards had had a sip, the stopper went in and the bottle went back in the fridge.
At the end of day two, Howard Twelftree and Tim John, who made perfectly good stewards without uniform, helped me stack all the cartons on the back of Tim’s truck. We drove into Whitmore Square, straight across the lawn to a large circle of recreational drinkers, sitting there around a flagon beneath a Moreton Bay fig. They eyed us suspiciously, thinking we looked like trouble from the council or somewhere.
We pulled up. I wound the window down.
“You blokes drink champagne?” I asked.
Cynical grumbling. Nobody looked up.
“Do you blokes drink champagne?”
Eventually one barked: “Of course we drink f*****g champagne.”
“Good,” I said, climbing down.
It took us a few minutes to unload that truck. Without a word, we stacked those dozens up on the lawn. Bollinger, Cristal, Mumm, Dom, Heidsieck, Lanson, Möet, Krug, Billecart-Salmon, Laurent-Perrier, Gosset, Gratien, Pol, Veuve, Pommery … brut, pink, demi-sec … every exotic, expensive fizz imported into the country came off the back of that truck. Nobody moved. Then we climbed back aboard and drove away into the traffic.
My last viewing of those gentlemen saw them standing in a ring around that mountain of Christmas fizz, just gazing at it.
I reckon the Salvos learned a bit about posh fizz that night. Serves ’em right. Jimmy woulda loved it.
Bloody uniforms.
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