Friday, July 17th

One of the topics for the Writing Group this week was The Windfall.  I didn't want to write about winning the lottery or inheriting a fortune, because everyone thinks of that so I churned out the following and I think my fellow writers appreciated the attempt at humour.

The Beatles were wrong, you know, when they sang ‘All You Need is Love’.  Nigel and Cindy had plenty of that in the early 1970s but, as they soon discovered, it didn’t pay the rent or the grocery bill.  They had a new baby and, inevitably, Cindy’s contribution to the family income had been cut back, and with a baby, there’s always more expense: baby blankets, and nappies and so on.  They had moved away from their families when Nigel took the new job at the private school in Sydney so they couldn’t, any longer, ‘drop in’ on their Mums and Dads, or even their friends, for a free meal when finances were tight.

It seemed to have been a widespread problem.  Nigel’s brother was very vocal about some of his friends who happened to drop in regularly on Thursday nights when they were getting a bit short of cash, especially as they would hang around until good manners insisted that he had to invite them to stay for dinner.  Nigel and Cindy sympathised with the friends and their plight the night before pay day because they were all struggling in the same way.

Cindy’s mother was probably wiser than the Beatles because one of her sayings was, “You can’t live on love.”  She used to say it, with pursed lips, if she caught Nigel and Cindy buying something she thought was trivial, like new wallpaper for the baby’s room or a bottle of cheap wine.

Life wasn’t all bad.  Luckily, Nigel was able to do some private tutoring on one afternoon a week with one of his students whose parents had a fish and chip shop; they never let Nigel leave their home after the lesson without a parcel of their choice fillets and best chips.  That was always Nigel’s and Cindy’s most anticipated meal of the week.  Tutoring opportunities came up from time to time but this source of income was unreliable and Nigel needed something more regular. Several times he had approached his principal to ask for a raise but was always solemnly told that it was just not possible, before the principal drove away in his BMW to his million-dollar home on the foreshore at South Coogee.  Just when Nigel was thinking that he needed to look for a change of occupation, into something which paid better – maybe taxi driving - the principal approached him with an interesting offer.

“There’s a flat belonging to the Randwick Presbyterian Church which has just become available,” he said.  “They won’t charge you any rent if you help out with the cleaning and maintenance of the church.  They’ll even pay you a few dollars a week for your efforts.” 

 

Maybe, in his own way, Nigel had been praying for a windfall to get them out of their predicament but, as the old saying goes “God helps those who help themselves.”  Instead of a win in the lottery or the death of a long-forgotten aunt who had remembered him in her will, Nigel was offered an opportunity and, as the mafia used to say, it was an offer he couldn’t refuse.  It worked out well: without rent to pay and with a few extra dollars in hand each week, their lives changed for the better.  Within two years, Nigel and Cindy were able to move into their own home and, although they have never been wealthy, they have never again been in need.

Fifty years later, Nigel was reading the book ‘A Bigger Picture’ by Malcolm Turnbull and was intrigued to discover that Malcolm had been one of the regular attenders at the Randwick Presbyterian Church in the early 1970s while he was boarding at the Sydney Grammar School boarding house just around the corner.  It gave Nigel a warm glow to think that he had been responsible for polishing the pews where the future Prime Minister had rested his bottom half a century before.