Filling in the Gaps Read Online Free PDF

Bourke Street where they had television sets in several windows with speakers outside. For ages we would watch such programmes as I Love Lucy and In Melbourne Tonight . We were not the only ones doing so; there were probably more than a hundred people there every night!
    One of the most exciting events that happened to me in Melbourne was when Dad decided, to my shock, to take us all down to the seaside town of Frankston - near where my estranged sister now has a very grand home - to watch the filming of the Stanley Kramer production of On the Beach starring Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins and Ava Gardner. We had a nodding acquaintance with the stars, Fred and Gregory being the most affable. They were happy to chat and sign autographs whilst Anthony was so handsome but very shy and I sensed that he was probably gay, which he indeed was. Sadly, he died of AIDS many years later. Ava was beautiful but withdrawn. She had just told the world press that ‘ if they had to make a movie about the end of the world Melbourne was the right city!’ A few weeks later they filmed scenes on a mock-up submarine built in the show grounds. Then they needed hundreds of extras for a scene outside the Public Library in Swanston Street and Flinders Street Station and of course yours truly was in the throng where they were supposed to be handing out suicide pills for the survivors of a nuclear holocaust - my first and only movie role... to date!
    Debbie Reynolds later worked with Gregory Peck in How the West Was Won and Fred Astaire in The Pleasure of His Company. Debbie told me that Fred was her favourite because when she was a teenager and learning how to dance for Singin’ in the Rain with Gene Kelly she had worked so hard there was blood in her shoes. At the end of her tether, she heaved the shoes across the rehearsal hall and was crying under a piano when she heard a tap-tap from a cane. It was Fred, who coaxed her out from under the piano and gave her a hug. He told her that he too still found it the hardest work and advised her never to give up because he believed she had the talent to make it in the industry. She certainly heeded his advice!

    Sex had well and truly reared its head by now and with it all kinds of confusion, not helped by a dreadful incident with Tommy Steele’s manager at the Tivoli Theatre in Melbourne. My experience with Mr. Steele’s manager as a schoolboy left more scars than I realised, which were deeply embedded in my subconscious and only surfaced when I wrote about the incident in my first book. They say that once one has opened the door and faced what happened; one is able to move on. However, for me the reverse is true. The wound is still very fresh and easily opened, even though it was a very long time ago. How children who have suffered sustained abuse, both physically and sexually, over many years have ever coped is totally beyond my comprehension.
    I used to attend our church teens social functions hoping to find out which path my sex life was going to take, probably more for Dad’s sake than mine. I remember asking a girl to dance, which was the idea of the function, but she held me so tightly I could barely breathe. The situation was not helped by her breath, which was heavy with garlic. I did notice a very good-looking lad who seemed as bored by it all as I was. I was too scared to strike up a conversation with him but we nodded to each other several times during the night and rolled our eyes as if to say “HELP”! I have no idea what happened to him but seeing him there and the occasional smile and nod was enough to make me go back each week - nothing at all to do with meeting the girls!
    After school one day, in my school uniform, I was allowed to go to see a movie in the city. In the cinema a much older, swarthy man appeared and kept approaching in the dark, closer and closer, row by row until he was finally sitting beside me. Suddenly I felt his knee brush