#BFOR - Frank Prem - Poet and Author

The BFOR Blog Tour

Throughout August and into September 2019 the UK based Books for Older Readers (#BFOR) Group is having a blog tour, visiting the pages of some of its members and taking a peek at articles and book reviews, or extracts from work done by or suitable to bring to the attention of members.

The group comprises both readers and authors, and the BFOR web page can be found here, while the Facebook group is here. Check them out.

Today it is again my turn to post an article that might be of interest, and I have chosen to provide some thoughts and extracts from Small Town Kid collection, today.

Small Town Kid context and settings

Small Town Kid is a free-verse memoir about a boy growing up in a rural Australian town during the 1960s and 70s.

On thinking about the collection, it occurred to me that there are, in fact, a number of discrete though overlapping contextual settings. For example:

Time
Place
Freedom
Naivety and awe

Time

The 20th Century was a time of enormous change, with the latter half – my half – propelling us into the age of computers and electronics. To the moon and back. And yet, while this was stirring all around us, and stirring us at the same time, we still bought our meat from the local butcher, or perhaps the rabbit-o, and it still came to us wrapped in the daily newspaper.

butcher’s paper

thursday

gather the papers
and lay them out flat
then carefully make
a tight roll

tie the bundle
with a length of string
and a butterfly knot
hoist the load
onto a shoulder
and start walking
up to ford street
and spencer’s butcher shop

the butcher-man
in his stained blue-stripe apron
smiles
and cracks a little-kid joke
in the cool shopfront
that smells the particular smell
of fresh meat and sawdust

he puts the bundle
on the scales
to measure by weight
the value of the popular press
in recent times

sixpence
for a couple of pounds of paper
and the news
becomes the wrapping
for another feed
of tender young chops

rabbit-o

a line of nails
head high on the paling fence
a sharp knife
and fast hands
are the basic requirements
of the rabbit-o

a hundred pair of bunnies
after a night of spotlighting
or setting traps
need speed
in the emerging sun of morning

gutted and skun
in thirty seconds each
skins are stretched wide to dry
inside out on wire
red meat is placed on white ice
fast
to avoid the risk of spoiling
before delivery to customers
as the day heats up

would you like a pair missus
they’re fresh this morning
your husband did some work for me
and I want to say
ta

Place

The location for these poems is predominantly the small town in which I grew up, Beechworth in the north east of Victoria, although the journey stretches as far as Melbourne – the capital city of Victoria. If you care to read my own introduction to the town, I wrote a piece a couple of years back that you can find here. The article has some pictures and links of significance.

The events and incidents that are described are things that a young child can see and encounter from such a place, and it would be tempting for me to include a soft poem of sunset or other beauty, but I will leave those in the confines of the book – the scenic Gorge, the fetes and parades and bonfire nights.

Today I prefer to to recall that, at that time and in that place there was a culture in the smaller country towns for male youth to gather in gangs and visit neighboring towns for a brawl on Weekends. Violence rendered social.

fight

tension builds
from sunday

through a week
of minor huddles
that materialise
and dissipate
on street corners

and where the local lads
the ones with wheels
and those merely
in attendance
half form tactical groups
for a moment

to plot
make arrangements
for the coming friday

anticipation melds
with the planning
of ways to set the scene
for the great
get-even
with the smartarse fools
from the other town
who have no right
to claim ascendancy

self-respect screams
for vengeance

next friday

there are thirty
or more
around the two
at the side of the street
in the granite gutter

chosen site
for the confrontation

knuckles and knees
punctuated by
the soft dull thud
of a metal pipe
striking home

among raw grunts
and muffled kicking
the stranger is downed
according to plan

the esteem
of the town
undergoes a restoration
with each connecting strike

the sound of the blows
in the eerie near-silence
is a pulse beat that reaches
to touch the young witness
running for home
with his eyes fixed
wide open

Freedom

My memory is of a latch-key childhood, of sorts. My parents both worked long days in the local Mental Asylum, so the pattern became one of having the day to myslef, and most of my firends in the town were in a similar position.

I believe this was largely true of city cousins, also. It was simply a time when kids had the day to themselves and were required to turn up for the evening meal at the right time, or when summoned from the back door.

It was freedom to make our own daily decisions and then to live with the consequences, as well. There was this one occasion I recall, when it seemed like a good idea to set off in pursuit of a meeting with a girl . . .

sweet maureen

I rode my bike
for sweet maureen
from beechworth to yackandandah

fourteen miles
of love-smit pedalling
down the hill
of the rising sun

a million miles an hour
not fast enough
but my breath
was taken away

I was drawn
down the road
descending like a bullet
from the barrel
of my rifle

drawn to ride
to sweet maureen

Naivete and awe

Momentous events that I can recall seem hardly worth mentioning in this day and age. The impact of having a sewerage treatment plant installed and the whole town connected was profound. Outside toilets and the nightman were replaced by indoor plumbing! Amazing.

Similarly, the impact of television becoming common can’t be overstated. It was huge. My father tells that he bought our first television (with money that should not have been used for the purpose) because his children were wearing out the carpet at a neighbors place, viewing the Mickey Mouse Club show every night.

That first television was attached to the wheel of a bicycle and the wheel rolled around to attain the correct signal wavelength.

discovering tv

if you walk
along the streets
in the heat
of the summer evening
you may note the blue glow
and irregular pulsing of light
that illuminates each house

muted voices
come from patios
and lounge rooms
to compete with the crickets
and cicadas
of a warm night

lights are off
and whole families have moved
out onto verandas
bringing chairs
and three-bum vinyl sofas
or sitting on the concrete

whiling away
flickering dark hours
and mesmerised
in the sensation
of discovering tv

Share your thoughts

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and a few poems extracted from Small Town Kid.

I’d like nothing better than to hear your thoughts and comments about the time you grew up in. Was it very different?

If you care to watch my reading of a few poems from Small Town Kid and Devil In The Wind (my second collection), pop over to my YouTube channel and check them out.

Keep Informed by Newsletter

Sign up for my Newsletter at the top of this page, and I’ll make sure that you receive all announcements and any other news news of The New Asylum – a memoir of psychiatry and my other books.

Publications

Devil In The Wind (May, 2019)

Devil In The Wind captures the voices of victims and survivors of the catastrophic Black Saturday bushfires that took place in Victoria (Australia) in 2009. See the full blurb here.

Small Town Kid (Dec. 2018)

Small Town Kid is a free verse poetry memoir of growing in rural Victoria (Australia) in the 1960s and 70s. See the full blurb here.

The BFOR Blog Tour

The group comprises both readers and authors, and the BFOR web page can be found here, while the Facebook group is here. Check them out.

Today it is my turn to post an article that might be of interest, and I have chosen to provide an introduction for readers to my lifetime association with Psychiatry, and my forthcoming free-verse poetry collection – The New Asylum – a memoir of psychiatry. For me, this story includes aspects of inheritance, and parent child relationships, each leading to a lifelong commitment to and association with the field.

Psychiatry and me

My parents and the mental asylum

My personal association with psychiatry goes back over 60 years, now, and spans almost as long as I’ve been alive.

It began around 1958 when my parents and my paternal grandparents arrived in Australia as new immigrants seeking a second chance in life, away from communist ruled Croatia (then part of Yugoslavia). On arrival in Australia, they were sponsored to live and work in a small rural town in north east Victoria, called Beechworth, and my mother quickly obtained work in the local Mayday Hills Mental Asylum, as those institutions were then termed.

She was employed to work as an untrained member of the nursing staff, known as a Ward Assistant, and she learned to speak English from fellow staff members hailing from various parts of Europe, and from the patients in her care. A peculiar case of blind leading blind, and the language of insanity serving as a template for the spoken word.

My father initially found work in local sawmills as he had some skills in milling timber. Sawmill work is hard physical work though, and is subjected to exposure from the elements and fluctuating demand. He considered himself fortunate to get a job a couple of years later working as a junior Kitchen Hand in the main kitchen of the institution. The kitchen catered for around 800 (and up to 1,000) patients at that time, and for the staff that worked within the Asylum. These included doctors and nurses and allied health staff, carpenters, market gardeners and herdsmen, tailors, hairdressers and engineers.

It was a complete village and entirely walled off from the community outside by a massive Ha-Ha wall.

Mayday Hills Mental Asylum Ha-Ha Wall remnant c. 2019

Myself and the Mental Asylum

As a child I visited one or other of my parents at work on a frequent basis.

I would generally visit my father in and around down-time in the kitchen. Between the flurries of activity required for preparation and serving of the three daily meals, and the clean up afterwards, there was considerable free time through a 10 hour shift.

The men from the kitchen (and they were almost exclusively men, at that time) had access to a massive full sized billiard table that I could barely see above. I was in awe of that table for a long time.

I would visit my mother on the wards where she worked, and generally this would be on a weekend because the Charge Nurse didn’t work on weekends, and only if she was working in a ward considered ‘safe enough’ for me to unofficially visit.

Some of the wards were decidedly ‘not safe’ for a young fellow. Mum sometimes told me of supervising patient meals when she was still inexperienced. She would stand in the doorway of the dining room and watch food and crockery fly through the air, unable to do anything to stop it.

A thing I did love as a child was collecting sets of picture cards. These came in many of the breakfast cereal packets at that time, and I had special ways of acquiring large numbers of these. I won’t reveal my methods here, but I can say that they involved a particular arrangement that I had with a certain Mr Kelly, who was the Asylum’s Chief Storekeeper.

Mayday Hills Mental Asylum General Store c 2019

The New Asylum – a memoir of psychiatry

I have many stories to tell about my childhood adventures in psychiatry, and my later journey – an inheritance bequeathed by my parents, I sometimes think – as a Student Nurse, then a qualified Psychiatric Nurse working in acute settings, a manager of such services, and ultimately back again, as an older generation nurse, working with a few folk who have acquired long term or lifelong disabilities as a result of their psychiatric illnesses.

I’m looking forward to sharing these stories with you in my forthcoming collection – The New Asylum – a memoir of psychiatry.

This is an often confronting collection that seems particularly apt at the present time, now that the era of Asylums – the loony bins – is behind us, and the seemingly endless chaos of contemporary psychiatric treatment and service provision is all around.

The style of this book is similar to that of Small Town Kid (see below), and anyone who has enjoyed reading those adventures is likely to also enjoy following the Kid into a lifetime spent working and experiencing public psychiatry.

A firm release date is pending, but I’m planning for early November 2019.

Keep Informed by Newsletter

Other publications

Devil In The Wind (May, 2019)

Devil In The Wind captures the voices of victims and survivors of the catastrophic Black Saturday bushfires that took place in Victoria (Australia) in 2009. See the full blurb here.