Angel

Wednesday,January 6th, 1960

It’s David again. Why can’t he get it through his head that someone who works in a hospital does not want to see some turgid monstrosity of a Continental film? It’s all very well for him, up there in his sterile, autoclaved little world where the most exciting thing that ever happens is a bloody mouse growing a bloody lump, but I work in one of those places where people suffer pain and sometimes even die! I am surrounded by gruesome reality—I cry enough, I’m depressed enough! So when I go to the pictures I want to laugh, or at least have a good old sniffle when Deborah Kerr gives up the love of her life because she’s in a wheelchair. Whereas the sort of films David likes are so depressing. Not sad, just depressing.

I tried to tell him the above when he said he was taking me to see the new film at the Savoy Theatre. The word I used wasn’t depressing, it was sordid.

“Great literature and great films are not sordid,” he said.

I offered to let him harrow his soul in peace at the Savoy while I went to the Prince Edward to see a Western, but he gets this look on his face which long experience has taught me precedes a lecture that’s sort of a cross between a sermon and a harangue, so I gave in and went with him to the Savoy to see Gervaise—Zola, David explained as we came out. I felt like a wrung-out dishrag, which isn’t a bad comparison, actually. It all took place in a Victorian version of a giant laundry. The heroine was so young and pretty, but there wasn’t a man worth looking at within cooee—they were fat and bald. I think David might end up bald, his hair isn’t as thick as it was when I met him.

David insisted on taking a taxi home, though I would far rather have walked briskly down to the Quay and grabbed the bus. He always lets the taxi go outside our place, then escorts me in up the side passage, where, in the dark, he puts a hand on either side of my waist and squishes my lip with three kisses so chaste that the Pope wouldn’t think it sinful to bestow them. After which he watches to see I’m safely in the back door, then walks the four blocks to his own house. He lives with his widowed mother, though he’s bought a roomy bungalow at Coogee Beach which he rents out to a family of New Australians from Holland—very clean, the Dutch, he told me. Oh, is there any blood in David’s veins? Never once has he put a finger, let alone a hand, on my breasts. What do I have them for?

My big Bros were inside, making a cup of tea and killing themselves laughing at what had gone on in the side passage.

Tonight’s wish: That I manage to save fifteen quid a week at this new job and save enough by the beginning of 1961 to take that two-year working holiday to England. Then I’ll lose David, who can’t possibly leave his bloody mice in case one grows a bloody lump.