Filling in the Gaps Read Online Free PDF Page A

be possible for me to visit the radio station. He answered positively to both my requests. When I saw the record library, the experience was almost orgasmic. He explained how lots of records were imported and some couldn’t be played yet because of various rights. I hung on to his every word. So a belated thanks Mr Rogers, whom I believe is still working in Sydney.
    Dad and Mum did take Jenny and me to see Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days at the Paris Theatre in Sydney where Mike Todd and his then wife, Elizabeth Taylor, were in attendance, but crowds were so thick we didn’t even manage a glimpse of them. Meanwhile, Tammy was playing all over Sydney, including at the wonderful drive-in theatres. Dad relented and finally took us to see it at the Skyline North Ryde. I caught him blowing his nose at the end so it must have moved him a little. I used to check where it was playing and get a train to a matinee session. I lost count of the number of times I saw it. Now of course I know Debbie Reynolds and I have Tammy on DVD but it still cheers me up if ever I am going through an emotionally stressful time, which is probably twice a week. I am jesting of course, it’s only once a week!

Melbourne
    Dad was then transferred to Melbourne with William Cooper & Nephews, a chemical manufacturing company famous for its ship dip products. We were all flown there on a tiny DC-6B. Mum had a great a fear of flying in those days, as I occasionally still do, so to allay her fears - not ours - she dosed us up heavily on Veganin, a kind of calmative. Jenny and I can vaguely remember boarding the aircraft but have absolutely no recollection of having had to be carried off the plane in the deepest sleep. Melbourne could have been Moscow!
    We stayed in a private hotel in South Yarra - all of us in one huge room - and I started school at Xavier College. Whenever my sister or I started at a new school - and there were many over the years - Mum would park her car outside the school just so we could see that she was still there when we had our lunch break. The car was loaded with her lunch and magazines and she would stay all day until we ran into her arms at the end of classes! She did the same thing years later when my youngest sister Patsy was born. It was such a sweet gesture and so typical of Mum.
    I wasn’t enamoured of Xavier. It was very heavy on sport and I was not. It also meant travelling on two buses, two trains plus a bus twice a day - once before school and once after school - because we lived in Beaumaris and the school was in Kew, a distance of about thirty kilometres. The best thing about Xavier College was that in mid-summer there were so many cicadas in the trees outside the classrooms that when the noise became intolerable we were sent home. Beaumaris was a newer suburb and we had a lovely home. Whenever we moved our new home was always a bit more upmarket. In Melbourne I also bought on hire purchase – I’m not sure I ever paid it off – my first portable Pye stereogram. I would shut my bedroom door and lie on the floor with one speaker beside each ear and play all my show records at full blast and imagine I was on stage or at least in the front row of a performance. I would play them for hours, totally transported!
    Melbourne is where my show business interests and other adventures began (well documented in my autobiography) but there were also many other ‘adventures’. One of these was my Mouseketeer encounter, which was initiated by my friends at Channel 9 in Sydney. I was probably the Mouseketeers ’ biggest fan in Australia and never dreamt that one day I would be able to spend time with them. In those days television was only about a year old in Australia, with three television stations - HSV7, GTV9 and ABV2. We were unable to afford our own television set then so we used to gather up folding chairs and rugs from home, take small meals that Mum made and sit outside Myers in