Climbing the Stairs Read Free Page A

he had.’
    I wasn’t really sure what performed meant, but everybody laughed so I presumed it was something a bit on the obscene side.
    George’s idea of being a man was to swear and spit and intersperse words with ‘bloody this’ and ‘bloody that’ and make dirty jokes out of anything. And between him
and Mr Wade there was a gulf that could never be crossed.
    After one of these ‘I love Australia’ conversations Mr Wade asked George in a very lofty tone of voice why, if he liked Australia so much, did he ever leave it? George then gave us
some long yarn about that he never would have left it but that the boss’s daughter fell in love with him and as he didn’t want to settle down at that time he thought he’d better
leave and so he went to Sydney.
    Of course the truth of the matter probably was that he started pestering the boss’s daughter and the boss didn’t like it, because no matter how democratic the boss was, if he was as
wealthy as George made out he was, I daresay he had other ideas for his daughter than that she should marry one of his sheep men.
    But anyway that was George’s story. So he lit out for Sydney. Then he went off delirious about Sydney and what a marvellous place it was. He said, ‘That’s the place for men.
They keep women in their place in Sydney. None of this bloody taking them out to the pub with you like they do over here. There aren’t any pubs where bloody women can go.’ And that
suited George down to the ground.
    ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘the pubs are only open till six o’clock in the evening so you all knock off work at five and you make a bee-line for the pub. You swill all you can,
and then you stagger home or if you can’t get home you stagger to the gutter and you lie down there.’ George thought it was a marvellous life.
    Then he told us that while he was in Sydney he married a widow about ten years older than he was and that her late husband had left her a lot of money. And I’m not even guessing when I say
that he married her for her money. Then he persuaded her to come back to England with him.
    Now he hadn’t got a picture of this wife of his – we never did know her name. In fact he said very little about her. He used to go off at great length about the other women he could
have married out in Australia; when he did speak about her he never had a kind word to say for her except that the only good thing she ever did in the world was to leave it.
    He’d say, ‘She was such a cold-hearted old bitch. She used to dole out her favours as though they were diamonds.’ And he’d add, ‘She was no bloody good in bed
anyway and before she’d let me in with her I always had to wash and shave and clean my teeth. And what the hell’s that got to do with * * * * * * *.’ I use asterisks to denote my
meaning because people make such a fuss about that word as though it was a new sort of vice, but the word and the deed were in use when I was young, I can assure you. In fact I never heard it
called anything else.
    Then he went on, ‘And she made me do all the bloody work in bed. Wore me out she did.’ So cook said, ‘Is it still worn out, George?’ She could say things like that, you
see. She had a nerve. So he said, ‘Oh no, I reckon I could bring it up to scratch if the occasion arose.’
    Then Mr Wade said, ‘I shouldn’t think the occasion will ever arise.’ George got so furious over this that he said, ‘I’m still a man, you know. I bet if it were a
contest I could beat you any day of the week.’ And an argument started. But neither of them was given the opportunity to prove it. This was the vain kind of boasting you get from men.
    The real reason why George used to get so livid about his wife was because when she died instead of him getting the money – the money he’d married her for – it went to her two
grown-up sons. It was in trust for them and he never got a penny. So for the most part of the time George had a grieving