Working Class Boy by Jimmy Barnes

its layout, except for the mud. As I looked down the street I could see rows of houses, all nearly the same as ours. All new and waiting for families to arrive and breathe life into them. There were pale brown brick homes and red brick homes, in no certain order, some were bigger than ours and a couple seemed smaller. But they all looked roughly the same to me.
    A few of the houses were already occupied. There were cars parked on the street and some of the houses had lawns fighting to push their way up through the mud. I could see signs of other children living nearby: the odd bike leaning against a fence and a ball or two that had been left out in the rain overnight. I knew I would be fine here.
    Forty-five Heytesbury Road, Elizabeth West, was my home for the next few years. They would be some of the best and some of the worst years of my life so far. In those years life twisted and turned like none of us could have expected.
    Time passed, and Mum and Dad didn’t find their dream; in fact, things went from worse to much worse. The life lessons that they were supposed to hand down to us, didn’t come as they should have. Those lessons – like every other lesson – got lost in fear and violence and drunkenness. We never learned about hope or the chance of finding our dreams. That didn’t happen to families like ours. Dad drank more and gambled more, Mum tried harder until she had nothing left to give.
    * * *
    Elizabeth looked like such a great idea on paper. They called it the City of Tomorrow. Bring out a hungry workforce ready to seize an opportunity to start fresh new lives and put them in a place where there were factories for employment, schools for their kids and homes for them to live in happily ever after. What could go wrong? But everything seemed to go wrong, right from the start. The factories paid just enough to feed the families and if they were frugal enough, and if they didn’t drink at all, they might just scratch out a life. But when you throw in alcoholism and ignorance along with all the other problems that people brought with them from Britain, life fell apart for most of them pretty quickly.
    The families we knew had trouble making ends meet, mainly because of the drinking problems they all seemed to have. The ones who didn’t drink were doing a little better. The families whose parents were sober seemed to keep away from our type of people and even looked down on us. I can see why now. Don’t get me wrong. It was hard for all the families, even the sober ones. But somehow if the parents weren’t drinking all the money, things went a little smoother. Funny that, don’t you think?
    When I walked home with the kids from school who seemed to be doing better than us, it sometimes got uncomfortable.
    â€˜Can I come into your place for a while and play? I’d like to see inside your house.’
    â€˜My mum doesn’t want you . . . er . . . anybody to come in tonight. Sorry Jim, you’d better just go home.’
    â€˜That’s okay, I’ve got things to do anyway.’
    And I would walk away feeling ashamed of myself and embarrassed that they didn’t like me.
    Some families drank more than others. My dad drank as much as any and we were struggling because of it. Dad would work hard trying to keep his drinking under control until payday, then he would be gone. At the start of every week, Mum would work out a budget that might just feed us and clothe us, and then would have to scramble to make ends meet when Dad drank the budget. Many a time we would have gone hungry if Mum hadn’t whipped up something from nothing. Mums seem to be able to do that.
    Mum tried her best to make Elizabeth our home. She got out in the garden and planted a lawn and fruit trees. She planted candle pines in the driveway. I know that sounds grand but the driveway wasn’t that long, which didn’t bother us because we didn’t have a car. I’m not sure Dad