Working Class Boy by Jimmy Barnes Page B

o’ ye.’
    Mum would be pouring the hot water from the pot into the cups. With all the steam coming up from the cups you could hardly notice the tears in her eyes, but I could see them.
    We had no garage but that was fine because, as I said, we never had a car. Not one that actually ran anyway. For a while there was some old wreck sitting in the driveway that us kids would sit in and pretend we were driving around the country. I’m sure Dad always had grand ideas about fixing it up for the family, butthe only thing handy about Dad was that he lived with us. He really wasn’t very good at fixing, hanging, painting, changing or growing anything. I’m not sure what he was good at but fighting and smooth talking. But damn he was good at both of those. When I think about it, I don’t think it would have been a good idea to get in a car with him anyway.
    Many years later I was doing Sixty Minutes for television and I went back to Elizabeth to stand outside and film the house we grew up in. The woman who lived there saw me and asked if I wanted to come in and look around. I said straight away, ‘I used to live here when I was really young.’
    She smiled at me and said, ‘I already knew that before I rented it.’
    When I walked in I couldn’t believe how small it was. This house was tiny. For us to have lived there with six kids and parents who couldn’t stand to be in the same room as each other was amazing. No wonder we all went crazy. The house looked a lot better than when we lived there and felt like a happier place.
    I told her that I felt glad to see that the place finally had a loving family living there. A house needs a family that loves to make it a home. She gave me a cuddle and I left.
    The house was a semi-detached and another family lived there, right next to us. The walls were thin and didn’t stand a chance of blocking the noise that went from house to house. We knew what they were eating; in fact, the walls were that thin we almost knew what they were thinking.
    I felt sorry for the neighbours not only because of the fights Mum and Dad had, but because of us kids. We were wild, always running in and out, slamming doors or stomping up and down the hallway shouting at each other.
    â€˜Get lost, you’re a scab. Mum, he’s hitting me.’
    And so on. Maybe we weren’t that polite either. We would regularly climb onto the roof and run around up there. Especiallyme; I used to think that I was in the television show The Samurai and I’d climb up to the roof and jump off all the time. Sometimes onto my sisters; other times, if I was escaping some imaginary enemy, I would jump into the poor neighbours’ yard and scare the hell out of them.
    I thought I was a ninja and would throw things at people and hide up trees, waiting in ambush to spring onto an unsuspecting foe. I even made my own throwing stars out of cardboard. They weren’t very dangerous and they didn’t go very fast or far. Some of my friends made them out of the top of tin cans. I think they cut themselves up more just making them than they cut anyone else throwing them. But they were dangerous and they didn’t mind throwing them at anybody.
    I would run around and hide in the paddock opposite our house. I thought I was really good at hiding like a ninja, until I realised that no one was looking for me. That’s why they never found me. That sort of took the shine off things, but I kept on playing regardless.
    One of the neighbours at the back of the house was a singer and had a hit on Adelaide radio covering something like ‘I Remember You’, the Frank Ifield song. Me and the other kids would sing it over the fence of his house as loud as we could. As soon as the back door opened we would be gone, not a trace of us anywhere. We thought it was cool for about five minutes to have a pop star living nearby and then we forgot all about it. I never heard his name again so