#SmallTownKid - Frank Prem - Poet and Author

The Small Town Kid is in new stores.

I mentioned a few days back in my daily blog that I have started working through my back catalogue in order to place them in a format that allows me to list them more ‘widely’ than just Kindle in digital format, Starting with the Small Town Kid collection.

What a job! It has taken a while to remember all that I had forgotten and to recreate the muscle memory needed to establish a routine of preparation and checking and testing, before uploading. Not a super-big set of tasks, but still a challenge to get right.

Regardless of that, the fruits of my labour are manifesting, with the first couple of books showing active digital book (e-pub format) links to online book-retailing stores like Barnes and Noble (Nook Book), and Kobo.

Phew!

I thought I might do well to celebrate, just a little, by revisiting each book over the coming week or so, starting with Small Town Kid.

A background to the Small Town Kid

Migration of the Stateless

I was born in 1956 (the year the Olympic Games came to Melbourne) in Hamburg, Germany. My family were passportless, non-Communist-affiliated immigrants out of then Yugoslavia. Passportless because their ethnic background was German, rather than Slav, and because of a staunch (catholic) refusal to join the ruling Communist Party. To join the Party would, perhaps, have guaranteed better jobs, but required a renunciation of religion (as I understand it).

The family were able to obtain a passport giving them German nationality. Before leaving Yugoslavia, they had nominated Australia as a final destination because there were some family members already here (in the small rural township of Beechworth).

Who was affected? How?

The migration represented very different things for each of my parents. For my father, the chance to get a fresh start. To be man unoppressed and with some control over his own future.

Dad was 25 years old when they migrated and with him came my grandparents who were still rearing three younger children. As well, my mother, my sister and myself. So it was a two-family migration, with the expectation that they would help each other settle and grow.

For my mother, it was different story. For her, migration was about getting a life for her children. It was clearly and entirely a sacrifice that she made, for she was very close to her parents, who couyld not make the journey. There was a very real possibility that she would never see them again.

To a great extent, my mother felt alone in this adventure, and some part of her loneliness and distress never left her, and Small Town Kid, I think, reflects this sadness she carried.

All in all, the family remained in Germany for around 12 months, during which time, I was born in Hamburg. They would have happily stayed in Germany – there was work, the old country and mum’s family were only 2 European countries away, the language was manageable and so on. In the end, though, there was no choice and the move had to be made – a five day journey by airplane.

They arrived with virtually nothing in hand, and the family story tells that when the tea chest filled with crockery and such goods arrived months later, all but one plate had been smashed in transit.

Work, Work, Work

When in Beechworth – the small town that became home, work of various kinds abounded for the adults. This was the 1950s. All sorts of everything were happening. Labour was needed. Jobs, jobs, jobs.

Mum ended up working in the local lunatic asylum (Mayday Hills) as an untrained nursing staff member (with no English language skills, initially). Dad worked a number of jobs, including forestry work before ending up as a cook at te same lunatic asylum.

Both their jobs involved long-day shift work. In dad’s case, he was rosytered to work 10 hour days, but on a pattern of one day worked and one day off-duty. On his off-duty days he always had side jobs. How else to furnish a home, to build a place of your own?

Mum’s days were exhausting 13 hour shifts – two days worked and two days off-roster. With plenty of overtime.

Poetry Readings from Small Town Kid

Below are some of the readings from Small Toiwn Kid located on my YouTube Channel. I hope you enjoy them.

Smashwords Link

It should be possible to find the digital version of Small Town Kid fairly readily, now, including in the Kindle store, still. For the purpose of this re-presentation though, I’ll pop in the linl to the Smashwords store for you to check out.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1091148

The New Asylum Revisited

A companion article on The New Asylum is now published, here.

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.

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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.