The Winds of Lonsdale Street

“Human nature”—that innermost kernel of what mankind is—has not changed with the ages. If it had altered, how is it that we recognise so instantly the frivolous curiosity of Eve, or the stiff-necked integrity of Job? The gentleness of the Good Samaritan, or the greed, treachery and remorse of Judas? How, today, do we insert ourselves so comfortably into the discourse of Plato and Socrates, and their times so long ago?

Occasionally in New Guinea I have spent time in high mountain villages, where few people had so much as glimpsed a white skin before, and even the lingua franca Pidgin was unknown; verbal communication was nil. Yet, within a day or two, I felt pretty sure that I had identified the local Solomon, the local Isaiah, the local strong, flawed King David. And yes, now and again, the local black-skinned Eve, shyly trading her string-bag of fruit fresh from the garden.

A.D. Hope tells us, in his “Meditation on a Bone”, how he discovered schadenfreude of a thoroughly modern kind engraved in runic characters on an ancient bone fragment: “I loved her as a maiden; I will not trouble Erland’s detestable wife; better she should be a widow.”

“Human nature”, by definition, includes everyone, between the extremes of, say, Stalin and Mother Teresa. Pointless, then, to exclaim as sometimes we do in exasperation: “There’s nobody you can really trust! Aren’t people a total pack of bastards!” And just as pointless to say warmly: “Wasn’t that kind! I just love people, don’t you?” Neither speaker is telling us anything valid or useful about the world, or about the mass of their fellow men and women who share it with them; all they are revealing is their own mood of the moment.

I shall leave you at this stage to guess my own recent “mood of the moment” that followed two adventures in the one lunchtime. Both occurred in central Melbourne, on Monday June 27 last. (The date is not unimportant, as you will see.)

Hectic with traffic though it often is, the upper (eastern) end of Lonsdale Street is usually a pleasant place, planted centrally with thriving shade trees. But on certain days it becomes a howling canyon of fearsome wind gusts which can (and do!) hurl pedestrians to the ground. Or flick them sideways into the rushing motor traffic; the air can be filled with dangerous flying debris—even garbage trolleys.

Melbourne wits pretend to blame the Victorian Parliament House, which indeed stands only half a block distant. But not even massed politicians could produce such prodigious perturbations of the air as those that roar along upper Lonsdale Street. More likely those winds gather their strength lower down in the city, and then rush up hill only to find themselves barricaded behind those very tall buildings clustered around the Spring Street corner; these seem to act like the cork in a bottle, inside which the wind can only boil and eddy in frustration.

On just such a day I nosed my little car gently alongside a parking meter in the centre strip of the roadway. After many tries I succeeded in pushing open the driver’s door, and got my feet more or less firmly onto the bitumen. The wind obligingly slammed the door shut for me, but it also caught me up and swept me up like an autumn leaf which had escaped the street sweeper. I just managed to crook my left elbow round the stanchion of the parking meter, and hung tight; my left hand was totally engaged maintaining firm downward pressure on the crown of my broad-brimmed Akubra hat: a damned awkward posture, if you can visualise it.

My right hand was useless, because it was tightly gripping a fistful of loose change, ready to be fed into the voracious and already ticking parking meter. (When, a little later, I opened my grip, the hand looked ludicrously like that of a beggar who had had rather a good morning on the street.)

Safe, but stuck! It was a real-life scene all ready made for filming by the Marx Brothers. A young woman, herself about to blow past on the wind, saved herself by grabbing the same stanchion, and we held a tempest-tossed council of war to consider our ridiculous situation. She was—I thank Heaven for it—the soul of helpful practicality.

“Would it help if I took over the hat-holding for you?” she asked. We concluded that such a manoeuvre might prove risky for both of us. (We looked like two old-time mariners clinging to the rigging as their windjammer rounded Cape Horn in filthy weather.)

“I know! You try to stretch your right hand over towards me; then open it, and I can pick out the right coins and feed them to the meter. Then you can just drop the other coins into your jacket side pocket, and we’ve gained a whole spare hand between us.”

And so it came to pass (as the Bible would say) that, arm in arm, we made it to the sanctuary of the nearest footpath, and the shelter of its shop verandahs. My Good Samaritan (if ever there was one!) then offered to escort me the remaining hundred yards or so to the very door of my destination—Lucattini’s admirable restaurant in nearby Punch Lane; pride (or perhaps stupidity) made me refuse. I thanked her and went bravely on alone, to enjoy a congenial and calming lunch with the old mate who had been awaiting me at table.

We all recognise that the two funniest sights in the world are a man (preferably fat) chasing his hat down a windy street, or struggling with his umbrella blown inside-out. Where would slapstick have gone without them? Adventure had not finished its grisly sport with me that day, and as I didn’t have an umbrella it had to be the hat. Just as I was on the point of lowering myself safely into the driver’s seat for the run home, a ferocious gust plucked my hat off and dumped it on the road, right under my clear and close view through the windscreen. The wheels of two speeding cars had already crunched it into the road before a well-set-up young man, with magnificent assumption of near-constabulary authority, stepped into the roadway and, with upheld hand, stopped the traffic.

“Sorry I couldn’t have been just that bit quicker,” he said, in response to my thanks, as he handed my newly remodelled hat in through the car window. My noble Aussie headgear was now a flat disc of felt, about the diameter of a generous dinner plate. Half of it was grey fur-felt colour, and half of it black from tyre rubber and tar. Its former rather handsome bunch of colourful native bird feathers, picked up on walks, was a mere shred.

I dropped in on Bill, my friend the local drycleaner, merely to share the joke with him, and certainly without any notion of possible repair. But Bill took the hat from me for a grave professional diagnosis. Then: “Leave it with me”—and my Akubra disappeared into the back of the shop. About two weeks later, after Bill’s skilled and patient labours behind the scenes, my hat reappeared on his front counter. Bill should change his name to “Lazarus”, and go full time into resurrection.

“You’d never guess two cars had run over it now, would you?” he said proudly.

I inspected it minutely, and agreed. “Bill,” I said, “you’d never think even one car had rolled it out.”

He had done all this without charge, as a present: and now I am back in the feather collecting business. In a couple of weeks nobody will be able to spot any difference.

My “mood of the moment” was of humble pleasure at such a demonstration of just how spontaneously kind and helpful some people can be. But it would be starry-eyed to forget that there are plenty of others who would simply have let me blow away, hat and all. We have a duty to encourage decent behaviour whenever we find a chance to do so, and I have an uneasy feeling that my thanks at the time to my Lonsdale Street rescuers may have been both incoherent and inadequate. Let me repeat the date: Monday 27 June last (the lady at about 12.30 and the gentleman at about 2.30). If by some miracle either of them should chance to read this, would they care to contact me through Quadrant’s office, so that I may thank them in better style?